I know some of you out there enjoy and respect Bill O’Reilly and FOX News, and hey, that’s your prerogative. I try to leave that network alone, except for my weekly forays into trashy TV and The Simpsons.
However, last night an ad caught my attention. It was an ad for a later segment on FOX’s version of “Sixty Minutes.” The ad showed a list of names of soldiers recently killed in Iraq, presumably taken from some liberal network, and the announcer intoned “Lists of American soldiers killed in Iraq: newsworthy, or liberal propaganda? Find out at 10 pm.”
My question is this: How could a list of names be considered propaganda? Obviously one could present the names in a heart-wrenching fashion with lots of pictures of doves and crying widows and orphans, but the list itself, assuming that it is accurate, is not propaganda. It is a list of names of dead people who happened to be soldiers killed in Iraq.
I admit some forces in the media have a liberal bias: Newsweek and The NY Times, to name two. There is a difference, though, between putting a spin on the news and not reporting it at all. Look over there! Fags trying to get married! There is no war in Iraq! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! We are winning the war on terror! Not releasing the names of the dead, assuming that the families have already been notified and that the deaths are true, seems to me less like liberal propaganda than like refusing to report the facts.
While I agree that a list of names itself cannot be propaganda, it’s usually used in the same way that that ad was - propaganda. The list of names itself is not bad. It’s good to respect the people that have died for us. It’s not good to say that their deaths were meaningless, or that their effort was meaningless.
There’s a poster at our school [in Wilson Commons] that does much the same thing, and it’s always pissed me off. It implies that all wars have been bad, our effort in them was meaningless, and that people never need to fight. If someone hadn’t defended that person’s rights, the poster couldn’t have even been made.
It’s just a matter of how it’s presented.
April 29th, 2004, at 3:08 pm #What I love about FOX, what I really, really love about it, is that it is NOT fair and balanced. It’s right wing. That being said, we’ve had a huge lack of right wing TV up to this point, b/c Fox News is pretty much it. CNN goes either way, sometimes they’re conservative, sometimes liberal, and always do they suck. But FOX News is the first and only REPUBLICAN TV station. So yeah, they’re going to adamantly defend the president. So much as bad mouthing the war in Iraq is considered treason by them. At the same time, it’s refreshing, especially for people like me, who before had to deal with that blowhard Tom Brokaw, who actually had the gall to suggest we were losing the war in Iraq the whole way through…up until the point when we won. Then they started babbling about how there was no WMD(which there was, just long ago, we knew that much as fact when he gassed his own people years ago. He just got rid of them after that). Basically just don’t watch FOX News, because I can’t imagine you ever liking it. It’s like whether or not you prefer vanilla or chocolate icing on your cake. Eat the one you prefer. Watch the TV station you prefer. And no, the list itself isn’t propoganda, that’s total bullshit. But it’s republican bullshit, and that’s the tasty kind for me.
April 29th, 2004, at 3:39 pm #It just got better. The station owner pulled Nightline’s list of the war dead because he said it was “motivated by a political agenda”.
I’m drawing a blank on this one. Huh?
April 30th, 2004, at 6:23 am #