UPDATED - ColdType

the news-consulting firm found that the viewers
had little interest in anti-war protests. Magid
doesn’t tell news directors to avoid protests. It
just says viewers tend to hate seeing them.
“Obviously, you have to give both sides of the
story,’’ says Senior Vice President Brian Greif.
“But how much time you devote to [protests] and
where you place it in your newscast becomes an
issue.” ●
MARCH 27: WHAT IS
THE “VALUE PROPOSITION?”
WHAT is real? What isn’t ? When is telling actually
selling? Watch the TV coverage of this
human disaster in the desert and tell me. The
complaints about managed media coverage seem
to have started trickling back into media-land.
MSNBC, which can, in a nano-second, go live to
Doha, can’t seem to capture the same immediacy
in the streets of New York where anti-war (and
increasingly anti-media) protests continued this
morning with more arrests.
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was, for the first time
that I have seen last night, acknowledging that
there is a legitimate dispute about the reliability
of the coverage and its impact. Nic Robertson of
CNN, reporting now from Jordan also acknowledged
that journalists from other countries view
developments differently than our merry band
of Embeds.
The pulse of propaganda
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
THE propa-news reached a new low this morning
with NBC’s Bob Arnot salting the troops by say-
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ing they are so much more motivated, brave and
patriotic than the actors who play soldiers in the
movies. It was almost as bad as a Fox TV special,
The Pulse, featuring Bill O’Reilly. It airs on cable
and on Fox News savaging Saddam’s son with so
much rhetorical overkill and bad music that it
looked like a World War II propaganda film
hatched in Dr. Goebbel’s ministry of misinformation.
(The word “rape” must have been cited a
thousand times, just in case you missed it the
first 999 times. When will O’Reilly do a similar
trash job on the U.S. Air Force Academy – at
which there has been testimony that virtually
every female student has been raped?)
After an hour of news that seemed as if it was
coming straight out of official military briefings,
including detailed descriptions of humongous
bunker buster bombs that left a mushroom cloud
over Baghdad, no attempt was made to explain
WHY these bombs were necessary, or what their
impacts were.
Listen to Robert Fisk of The Independent on
the bombing of that market in Baghdad that the
U.S. government is implying was caused by Iraqi
defense missiles. Ask yourself why we never
hear anything approaching this angry tone in
U.S. journalism.
Outrage journalism
“IT was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed
hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and
mud across the road, the human brains inside a
garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an
Iraqi mother and her three small children in
their still-smoldering car.
“Two missiles from an American jet killed
them all by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civil-