Michael
Jackson Story Is A Plot
By Antonia Zerbisias
The
Toronto Star
25 November , 2003
Maybe
the conspiracy theorists are right after all.
Maybe they're just wrong about the particular conspiracy.
No, U.S. president
George W. Bush and his posse of world dominators did not plot and plan
the 9/11 attacks so that they could unleash their dogs of war
not to mention American carpetbaggers on Iraq's oilfields.
But perhaps, along
with their pals in the boardrooms of Big Media, they've hatched a scheme
to dumb down the nation so that they can inflict their will upon the
world while American voters are transfixed on "Bachelor Bob"
burning the beef on the barbecue.
How else to explain
last Thursday's orgy of Michael Jackson coverage on CNN hours
of choppercam shots of airport runways and police station parking lots
on the day that Bush was being trashed in effigy in London, 27
people were killed and 400 injured by truck bombs in Turkey, a U.S.-Canada
task force report on the causes of August's massive blackout was released
and who knows how many U.S. troops were becoming casualties in Iraq?
Was CNN merely pandering
to the stupid for commercial reasons or deliberately avoiding
the news? Has last spring's "That's Mili-tainment!'' revue reverted
to "That's Info-tainment!'' Have the networks run so far from serious
reportage on domestic, economic and international affairs that they
no longer know how to do anything but scandal? Or and here comes
my conspiracy theory is there something else afoot, and people
are too catatonic to recognize it?
Consider that, still,
most Americans are convinced that Saddam's boys rammed those planes
into the towers.
According to Sam
Smith, founding editor of The Progressive Review (http://www.prorev.com),
that misperception is just one of "the effects of living in a semio-sphere
of erroneous, deliberately false or badly distorted information. For
example, in the lead-up to the Iraqi invasion, the TV channels were
inundated with `military experts,' despite the fact that making peace
requires considerably more expertise than making war. But absent comparable
time for `peace experts,' one can't expect the public to understand
the arguments or even that there are any."
We, or at least
those of us who look outside the shiny, happy bubble of American Big
Media, now know just how ghastly, how gory, how grotesque the effects
of the Anglo-American invasion were upon the people of Iraq.
Yes, they may be
"liberated" and, true, better off in the long run. But at
what a cost!
Not that you saw
that terrible human toll on CNN which, like most other American news
services, gave us G.I. Journalism from the "embeds'' not
to mention tribute walls of pin-ups of the kids fighting over there.
(With them now returning in body bags excuse me, "transfer
tubes" where are the photos today, hmmmm?) The networks
decided that the sights, sounds and smells of death were just too much,
even for viewers who happily watch make-believe murder and mayhem every
night in primetime.
Which brings us
to Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories Of The War, a one-hour ad-free
documentary on CBC Newsworld tonight at 9 and on the main channel at
10. Dozens of journalists from all over the world spill their guts,
so to speak, on seeing guts being spilled and not being able to depict
it. NBC cameraman Craig White comes out and says that his network would
not show a G.I. being shot.
Be warned: There
are some disturbing images. And there is one revolting anecdote about
young Ali Abbas, the orphaned boy who came to worldwide attention after
he lost his arms and his family.
But that's the news
biz.
It's also part of
the biz to risk your life covering a war, as the doc's opening sequence
reminds us. But the April 8 strike on Baghdad's Palestine Hotel and
Al-Jazeera bureau by a round from a U.S. tank, an attack that left two
journalists dead, still doesn't look like an accidental hazard of war.
In fact, last week,
there were reports out of Iraq that "jumpy U.S. soldiers"
are abusing the few journalists still there.
As for the White
House, it recently honored four U.S. reporters, three of whom died in
Iraq, plus Daniel Pearl, who was executed by abductors in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the Bush gang ignored the five journalists killed by U.S.
forces in Iraq. (Speaking of which, there's still no explanation from
the Pentagon about the shelling of the Palestine Hotel.)
In the end, Deadline
Iraq offers little news to the most addicted news junkies. At least
not those in Canada. In the U.S., where the coverage was USA-all-the-way,
it would be an eye-opener. But you can bet CNN viewers will never see
anything like it.
Nor will they likely
see Danny Schecter's WMD: Weapons Of Mass Deception, a film in progress.
That's because, judging by the 20-minute preview he sent me, his film
is a surgical strike on the mainstream media coverage of the conflict,
much like his daily Web log (http://www.mediachannel.org). You can be
sure no network would be interested in buying or airing it.
Hardly surprising
really. Why would the networks 'fess up to hiding so much of the truth?
Which only helps
prove that conspiracy theory of mine: Michael Jackson is a spook working
for Dick Cheney.
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