The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias continues to come up with some quality blogging which calls out the media on its hypocrisy. On Friday, she turned
her sights on the (ripe-for-picking) opinion page of the
Wall Street Journal which on Friday asked rhetorically:
You decide. In the course of his op-ed ... Mr. Smith criticized the U.S. media's habit of routinely broadcasting terrorist statements and tapes obtained from the Arab-language broadcaster al-Jazeera and raised questions that many Americans have asked themselves: By airing such footage--of insurgents in Iraq holding hostages or attacking U.S soldiers and of al Qaeda officials promising death and destruction--do TV networks effectively (if unwittingly) enter into a propaganda partnership with terrorists?
The Mr. Smith in question is Dorrance Smith, currently attempting to go to Washington, as the Defence Department's chief spokesman. Mr. Smith attracted the attention of Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee for his previous authorship of
this article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal in April, 2005, and included the following gem:
While I was in Iraq in 2004, Al-Jazeera was expelled from the country by the Iraqi Governing Council for violating international law.
As Ms. Zerbisias points out:
Whoa! Back up there.
Does everybody remember Bremer?. He's the guy who cut, run and snuck out of Baghdad with his carpet bags fully packed. (Here's one of my old columns on the subject.) He gave that "Iraqi Governing Council'' its marching orders. And it was Bremer and Smith who were constantly shutting down Al Jazeera and kicking it out of Iraq.
So Mr. Smith points to how Al Jazeera was kicked out of Iraq as proof that they were aiding the terrorists when it was his boss Bremer who kicked them out in the first place.
Senator Levin, rightly, took issue with this spinmeistering.
"Unless he can make a convincing case that his recent op-ed does not accurately reflect his views, I will oppose his nomination."
On Friday, the WSJ came back with their editorialwith the balanced title: Terror's Mouthpiece:
Carl Levin tries to keep a critic of al-Jazeera out of the Pentagon.
Leaping to Mr. Smith's defence, the WSJ says:
Mr. Smith has standing to address these issues in part because the former ABC news producer spent nine months in Iraq as a media adviser to Ambassador Paul Bremer. He knows more about terrorist propaganda, and its potential effects, than the Americans on the receiving end of the terror tapes.
Antonia Zerbisias calls them on it:
Here's one I would ask: Does supressing the news and the gruesome reality of Iraq serve anybody?
Here's another: Does minimizing the very real threat of kidnappings help people who might be considering going there to work or invest?
Here's yet another: How exactly does showing videos of brutal, vicious and horrific kidnappings -- and remember, contrary to right wing claims, not one beheading has been depicted on Al Jazeera -- work as good public relations for ''terrorists''?
Censorship! There's no lie like it.
For those of you wanting to see one Canadian's view of the US media (as well as for some insights on Canadian goings-on), you could do worse than Antonia Zerbisias' blog.