I bet you couldn't.
One observation was made yesterday: of the 18 people in the crowd dragging Saddam's head away - 7 were reporters.
I bet you couldn't.Originally posted by: Toasthead
I bet I could photoshop George Bush's head on batboy's body and people there would belive that GW really IS batboy.
Originally posted by: apoppin
I bet you couldn't.Originally posted by: Toasthead
I bet I could photoshop George Bush's head on batboy's body and people there would belive that GW really IS batboy.
One observation was made yesterday: of the 18 people in the crowd dragging Saddam's head away - 7 were reporters.
As an eyewitness of the news program I was watching yesterday . . . . CBS or ABC (or was it NBC; but definitely not BBC) . . . I am sure a search would turn it up IF I cared to.Originally posted by: etech
Originally posted by: apoppin
I bet you couldn't.Originally posted by: Toasthead
I bet I could photoshop George Bush's head on batboy's body and people there would belive that GW really IS batboy.
One observation was made yesterday: of the 18 people in the crowd dragging Saddam's head away - 7 were reporters.
Any proof of that statement?
Again no. It was NewsWeek or Time a few months ago that had the story about a Frenchman that wrote a bestselling book in France about it.What this business about the US flying the planes via remote into the twin towers. That's a trip. Got a link.
Originally posted by: apoppin
As an eyewitness of the news program I was watching yesterday . . . . CBS or ABC (or was it NBC; but definitely not BBC) . . . I am sure a search would turn it up IF I cared to.Originally posted by: etech
Originally posted by: apoppin
I bet you couldn't.Originally posted by: Toasthead
I bet I could photoshop George Bush's head on batboy's body and people there would belive that GW really IS batboy.
One observation was made yesterday: of the 18 people in the crowd dragging Saddam's head away - 7 were reporters.
Any proof of that statement?
And I am specifically referring to the MOST famous scene of toppling the statue, Saddam's head being dragged off with 11 people beating on it and 7 reporters photographing it.
Originally posted by: Moonbeam
The other 11 were probably camera men.
What this business about the US flying the planes via remote into the twin towers. That's a trip. Got a link.
It's funny how Bush clones get all wound up by people who will believe anything. What's the facination, I wonder. Oh man.
Originally posted by: etech
I be damned if I care to prove anything to you.Originally posted by: apoppin
Uh huh, sure. I'll believe it when and if you can provide some proof. Until then,it's just another moonism.
I was making a statement of what I saw. Since it is not arguing for or against the topic's title, it is not important to me that you "believe".
Originally posted by: Moonbeam
You kinda notice after a while that that's etech's way of trying to maintain relevance and control. Prove this or that while he makes fun of you or me. Hehe. I peg it as a bully symptom. It's etechism for you.
The War For History: Shades Of Truth And Fables[/b]
BY KELLY HERTZ
P&D Managing Editor
History is written by the winners, or so George Orwell once noted. But he made that observation in an age when history's violent rough drafts weren't so readily available for inspection by the masses -- practically before the history itself was even made or the winners determined.
Today, we live in a world of instant eyes and ears, so the battle to "write" the history of the Iraq war as it happens -- to spin it, to shape it into a digestible form favorable to one party over another -- has become a dazing, meticulous science.
As a result, I can't take what I see or hear (or, from the newspaper standpoint, receive) about this war wholly at face value. It's not that I think I'm being lied to. Rather, I've concluded that what I'm encountering are mostly shades of the truth, colored by a certain perspective. And truth, it seems, has many shades and many sides to it. This knowledge has made me cynical.
But it's nothing new, and that drives me crazy. I've devoted a good portion of my life, not to mention a hefty chunk of tuition money, to studying history and embracing it as the story of what we are. But I've come to suspect that Orwell was right, and this has introduced an uncomfortable notion of doubt into my confidence in what I know. "What is history," Napoleon asked, "but a fable agreed upon?"
For the moment, let's not dwell on past fables;u] [let's look at the history unfolding now in the many avenues of media at our disposal. As we read and watch, as we are transfixed, are we seeing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?[/u]
Wednesday's felling of a statue in Baghdad of Saddam Hussein stands -- which is an ironic verb, I guess -- as an example of instant history shaded to fit an audience. Seeing the statue pulled down by a joyous Iraqi mob, aided by U.S. troops, brought to mind other cathartic moments of freedom: the tearing down of a statue of Lenin in Russia in 1991, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, even the lynching of Mussolini back in 1945. Wednesday's event was a similar piece of memorable history, or so many media commentators proclaimed. Less emphasized, however, was that much of Baghdad was still not under coalition control -- there was fighting just a few blocks away -- or that the crowd pulling down the statue was actually rather small. The great, "historic" act of liberation, though symbolically appealing, did not yet herald an end to the war or the rooting of true freedom.
But it resonated in the U.S. market, which has been exposed to the "Americanized" shade of the conflict. (CBS reporter Bob Simon, who has just returned from the Mideast and Europe, said this week that the war looks dramatically different through the eyes of American media than it does in other parts of the world.) How can it be otherwise? We're getting much of our news -- our instant history -- from reporters embedded with the troops; these journalists wear clothing similar to the military's desert camouflage uniforms and they often use the pronoun "we" when describing the movements of the soldiers. This creates the suspicion that what we are seeing may not be undiluted fact.
The U.S. doesn't corner the market on this shading.
Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language news network, has jumped into the wartime fray with the same pretenses ("Objective and balanced," the network declares on its English-language Web site, making it sort of the Arabic answer to the Fox News Channel) and with the same propensity to offer its own hues of reality. For instance, it has labeled its war coverage "War on Iraq," with that preposition inferring something quite different from, say, "War in Iraq." When an al-Jazeera reporter was killed earlier this week during a U.S. attack, a fellow reporter from the network told viewers, "We were targeted because the Americans don't want the world to see the crimes they are committing against the Iraqi people." (Was that the "objective" part or the "balanced" part?) Also, the network declared its slain reporter a "martyr," which in the Arabic world is a very potent term that undeniably takes sides. And the "Saddam statue" story on its Web site was overshadowed by the story/headline, "Volunteers resist U.S. troops in Baghdad."
And yet, this is the kind of reporting -- on both sides of the conflict -- that is vying to compose the instant history the world is devouring right now.
Alas, a truly objective history won't be written until time has passed and the propaganda has been sanitized. It would be a mistake to draw any historical conclusions now; in other words, whether or not military historians will someday be analyzing the "brilliance" of the coalition's ground war in Iraq, as some U.S. officials are boasting, will be a decision and a judgment left to others in years to come when calmer perspectives should prevail.
Or so we may hope. On the other hand, Winston Churchill once joked, "History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself." It's clear that some of the current participants -- whether they order air strikes or wield notebooks -- may be taking that quip to heart right now. And, given the saturation of this information age, it sometimes makes me wonder if we will ever have anything more than fables at our disposal after all is said and done.
Mass joy for mass media
Most of you have already seen the jubilant crowd of Baghdad's residents taking down the bronze statue of Saddam Hussein in the downtown Baghdad. In reality this "monumental event" turned out be just as illusory as coalition's proclaimed control of the Iraqi capitol.
In the end the big picture (literally) revealed the true events that took place on the Fardus Square: the square was surrounded by the US tanks and the ?jubilant crowd? turned out to be two dozen of Iraqis, some of which were recognized as Iraqi opposition members delivered to Iraq by Pentagon just days earlier.