"Gunmen" Kill 24 people in Iraq

tallus

Ok I thought this was weird.... was just watching the news when this report came across on itv news. I suppose it proves how cheap life is in Iraq and how one sided reporting is too. I can't remember what the report was verbatim, but it went someething like this " Gunmen have killed 24 people in Iraq after dragging them out of their cars and executing them" end report.
It got about three seconds air time.
Where I disagree with the presence of all foreign occupation troops in Iraq, one can be sure that had the shooting been done by any of the "coalition" forces it would have gotten a lot more airtime.
My 2 cents

Dirk Gently

tallus wrote:

Where I disagree with the presence of all foreign occupation troops in Iraq, one can be sure that had the shooting been done by any of the "coalition" forces it would have gotten a lot more airtime.
My 2 cents

Yeah but the coalition market themselves as the "good guys" and are there under the pretence of bringing peace, Democracy and human rights to Iraq. (After the WMD spin fell apart)
The insurgents are marketed as evil terrorists.

As a result of this propaganda promoted by the coalition forces it makes it normal in peoples minds when the insurgents commit an atrocity so it's not exactly news as they're simply doing what we are all lead to expect them to do.
On the other hand the coalition have branded themselves moral and good so it is news in our minds when they commit atrocities as it is contrary to what we are lead to believe.

I agree that every action committed by either side should get equal coverage but the spotlight being on the coalition is a consequence of their own propaganda that they are the moral defenders of freedom. It is also a side effect of the backlash against the lies Bush and Blair told to start the war in the first place. The media companies are selling a product at the end of the day and their customers, the TV. web blog and print media subscribers have an appetite for pressure to be put on bush and Blair because they are angry about how they were lied to and don’t see the war as being necessary. This market of anger has being tapped into by the reporters and are giving the public what they want, i.e. concentrating on coalition failures. Outrage and hysteria sells and the media will concentrate on the stories which they feel will get the most reaction from the public and keep them tuned in. Too often the media are biased in favour of the coalition (as in the start of the war) but now they can sell more by reporting on sensational failings of that war. (With the exception of fox which is nothing more than a press release office for the Whitehouse)

Media companies are there to make profit and will cover the stories which they feel will sell more papers and get more viewers. For an accurate (as accurate as a person can be without being a first hand witness) account of what’s going on it is necessary to scan a wide variety of media sources from each end of the political spectrum as well as non corporate blogs and websites. A pattern soon develops in the styles of reporting from each outlet which allows the reader to form his own informed opinion on the true nature of events by filtering out what he himself believes to be the least biased and least opinionated sources. (Not an exact science but better than relying on one source or a group of similarly motivated and opinionated sources)

Manic Moran

^^^^ That seems a reasonable analysis.

NTM

bonkey

tallus wrote:

I suppose it proves how cheap life is in Iraq and how one sided reporting is too.

I don't agree. Its simply a case that its not news any more. Sure, its a pretty high single-incident total, and its probably going to result in a higher-than-average daily count....but in terms of being news its about as significant as how many cents the price of oil jumped today.

I'm not trying to belittle the human cost, but the simple truth is that the tragedy is not that these people were gunned down, but rather the ongoing, day-after-day events which gave rise to this.

The news is not about finding the worst tragedies of the day and showing them to us. If they did, then something like poverty or AIDS should top the headlines every day. Why doesn't it? Because while its a tragedy and a story, its not news.

clown bag wrote:

It is also a side effect of the backlash against the lies Bush and Blair told to start the war in the first place.

Only in that if there wasn't a backlash - if there wasn't someone who wanted to see that things were still crap over there - this wouldn't be news.

If the public was overwhelmingly in favour of this war, or even mostly apathetic, it wouldn't even have merited the three seconds it got.

The media companies are selling a product at the end of the day

Indeed, and "no real change in Iraq" isn't really news any more and won't sell much copy (so to speak) so it doesn't get much time. Finding the daily tragedy just supplies a mechanism to avoid phrasing it the same way every day.

and their customers, the TV. web blog and print media subscribers have an appetite for pressure to be put on bush and Blair because they are angry about how they were lied to and don’t see the war as being necessary.

I think its a simpler case of self-interest. The daily deaths may not be really all that much news, but if a major news station isn't reporting on it, then it risks creating a situtation where it will be accused by some player in the game of being partisan - of trying to support the government's efforts to hide how its all gone wrong.

So even though there's SFA new to say, you gotta say it anyway. And when the govt. make their latest "all is well" statement, it gets a bit longer cause its not every day they say it, and you're balancing out overall....again keeping yourself well positioned so that when news breaks out, you're in a position to sell it.

Dirk Gently

Didn't want to start a new thread but seen as this thread is media related I'll comment here.

It was a good propaganda week this week. All over the media we had those anti-terror raids in England where sky news had a wet dream analysing the new chemical suits of the police who raided a random Muslim house and found err.....nothing. Never the less it got terrorism on the news and reinforced in the publics mind that terrorism is a threat. Also for some reason the Brits released footage of an IRA bomb exploding in London years ago getting good air time on the T.V. today. Tonight there is an anthrax scare in the houses of parliament and the whole place is locked down. This is like the farce when they had tanks and military guards at the London airports before after a "tip off". Army on the T.V. surrounding the airport, ummm wonder what message that gives people, be afraid, be very afraid.

I don't think people will be forgetting about terrorists anytime soon. Calls being made for more security at Parliament, people living in fear of their neighbours making bombs, relived IRA terror refreshed in people’s minds.

Victor

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2006/0607/

1,400 murdered last month in Iraqi capital

IRAQ: Almost 1,400 Iraqi civilians were murdered in targeted killings last month in Baghdad alone, and many more died in indiscriminate bomb blasts, making May the bloodiest month in the capital since the war began, Iraq's health ministry said yesterday.

Manic Moran

Well, FWIW, American news networks are reporting Zarqawi's death.

NTM

Hobbes

Do you have a link?

btw bbc news the other day had a report that the Iraqi morgue now has over 6,000 bodies in it.

J.S. Pill

"All over the media we had those anti-terror raids in England where sky news had a wet dream analysing the new chemical suits of the police who raided a random Muslim house and found err.....nothing. Never the less it got terrorism on the news and reinforced in the publics mind that terrorism is a threat"

Call me a conspiracy nut but if you ask me, this kind of media posturing seems to be a part of a concerted effort by the police/army/emergency services to become more visible. Anyone watching sky news and the like will have noticed that it has been getting more intense of late - but why now?: 7/7.
Its been almost a year since the 7/7 attacks so understandably the public is going to be a little bit edgy. If there are any terrorist incidents during the summer the police/army can simply wash their hands and say 'but look at how busy we've been of late, we've done all we could have' - of course nobody is going to 'say' that; flashy images of chemical suits and tanks and the like are quite sufficient to get that message across.

If I was the police/army/emergency services I'd probably be using the media in exactly the same way, I suppose all we can do is sit back and try not to get too offended.

Jimboo_Jones

Manic Moran wrote:

Well, FWIW, American news networks are reporting Zarqawi's death.

NTM

its on the BBC as well

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5058304.stm

This is a 'big win' for the new Iraq Goverment, and hopfully the people in Iraq as well.

Hobbes

Jimboo_Jones wrote:

This is a 'big win' for the new Iraq Goverment, and hopfully the people in Iraq as well.

Martyrs rarely are.

edanto

Hobbes wrote:

Martyrs rarely are.

Indeed, it could go either way. Fingers crossed that it all calms down over there soon enough. Personally, I think it would be best if the coalition could be replaced with a UN peacekeeping force drawn mainly from Arab countries.

Just to follow up a point raised by clownbag above.

This is like the farce when they had tanks and military guards at the London airports before after a "tip off". Army on the T.V. surrounding the airport, ummm wonder what message that gives people, be afraid, be very afraid.

That happened right after the massive anti-war marches around the world, when public opinion was starting to register on the the politico-meter. A month previous to the highly-visible heathrow tanks, 100 MPs had threatened to resign if an illegal war was started and around the same time Jack Straw had said that terrorist groups such as Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida and rogue states such as Iraq are "part of the same picture". [Incidentally, in the same story UK servicemen were warned that they could be in the Gulf for nine months or more...]

And because they believed their own bulllsh1t, they were prepared to do things like surrounding Heathrow with tanks to give people a taste of 'the fear' and to represent a big threat. It worked, images of tanks at Heathrow scared people. As it happenned, there were more messages coming at us through our media.... such as Colin Powell's performance at the UN, to which he later referred as 'a painful blot', and which was mainly lies. But it got the airtime. And contributed to support for the war.

Those that were anti-war were rarely given the airtime to explain their case on news shows and as far as I remember, a lot of the spokespeople that were invited on were cardigan-wearing university types which had the effect of representing the anti-war campaign as an eccentric, down-with-that-sort-of-thing group.

So, how does this analysis relate to what's happenning in Iraq now?

Well, firstly, we can't rely on the journalists that are in Iraq to get the whole story. Not because they are biased or anything like that, I believe they are very good people to be risking their lives over there. No, the reason is because it's not safe for them to be going around Iraq and reporting in the traditional sense. Almost all foreign journalists are based in the Green Zone in Baghdad, with an Iraqi crew sent out into the craziness to film the aftermath of atrocities. It must be frustrating for the journalists not to be at the scene, not to be able to ask the questions that they want to and being reduced to giving voice overs on the footage before sending it home.
http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/05/1822136.php

And that directly affects our perception of the war. In the same way that public opinion was influenced by the variety acts of Straw, Powell and the Heathrow tanks before the war, we now have no idea how Iraqis view the coalition forces, what their expectations are of their government or even who they think is responsible for all the violence. The US and UK governments constantly push their answers to those questions, but given their bias and history of representing lies as truth, we can't know if we should believe them. Hell, it's in their interest to tell us things are going well/getting better given the approaching US elections. But we don't know if that's true.

Those limitations on journalism are probably why the story that started this thread didn't get a lot of detail, it's possible that the only details known are the footage that the Iraqi crew got and the press release from the Coalition press office. And sadly, the other reason it didn't get much coverage is because the only thing unusual about it is the number of people killed at once.

The link that Victor posted shows that things are increasingly bloody over there for civillians and that's not a story that's likely to get a lot of press releases from the Coalition press office. And hence, not much airtime. If you think it's an important enough story, tell your friends and they might tell theirs. One way to stop this 'war' is to get people talking about it again.

Manic Moran

Jimboo_Jones wrote:

its on the BBC as well

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5058304.stm

This is a 'big win' for the new Iraq Goverment, and hopfully the people in Iraq as well.

It's a good political win, and will make people feel better in the short term, but I'm not sure that the insurgency hasn't reached a sort of critical mass of its own by now.

That said, I will wager the Jordanians are happy. Zarqawi has been on their hit list since the hotel bombings.

NTM

sovtek

Manic Moran wrote:

It's a good political win, and will make people feel better in the short term, but I'm not sure that the insurgency hasn't reached a sort of critical mass of its own by now.

That said, I will wager the Jordanians are happy. Zarqawi has been on their hit list since the hotel bombings.

NTM

Of course Zarqawi so far has been killed twice before and shot once I think. Oh and I noticed that there's going to be a big impeachment ad in USA Today...today.
As I said in the other thread Robert Fisk speculated that he's been dead for months...going by the fact that his family has heard nothing from him..even after a death in the family.
Put that with recent supposed video tapes of him and it all looks a big PR stunt to me....kinda like the capturing of Saddam, the toppling of his statue, Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman.

Chucky

Well, oil prices did drop straight after the Zarqawi death was announced. Plus, I thought that it was very odd the way the 'western' media kept showing the pictures of Zarqawi dead. It was as if they were trying to prove something. Either that or they just wanted to rub it into the Arabs' faces which is childish.