Smile Don't Frown

Last week (23^rd Oct.) The Guardian issued an 8-page pull-out entitled ‘The war logs: Iraq’. “Great,” I thought, “Iraq hasn’t been forgotten and now a major broadsheet is going to tell the truth over eight pages.” My interest was instantly vaporised when I read the line ‘a sectarian civil war merged with a war of “resistance”…’ Oh, the arrogance and stupidity of those quotation marks! So the most powerful country in the world illegally invades an oil-rich country and the people there are meant to just accept this? Is that what those quotation marks mean? Or do they imply that anyone opposing the illegal occupation with weapons is simply mad and murderous?

Rant over. Now I’ll quote from an email David Edwards sent on 30 September 2009 to Terence Blacker, columnist at the Independent:

‘The British media really are complicit in terrible crimes against people and planet…The fact is that media corporations are hierarchical, in fact totalitarian, organisations. Control resides entirely at the top – there’s no democracy, no sharing of power. It is actually one of the wonders of the modern world that a collection of private media corporations can combine together to persuade the public to wage war on a country like Iraq, while the public has essentially no ability to challenge that private propaganda. Media power, although immense, is almost completely unaccountable.’*