Letters to the Editor
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What a surprise
I would think the 20 million dollars could be put to much better use buying much needed supplies for our troops. Then again, what I do know? I don't have a Bush/Chenny/Support the Troops bumper sticker on my car.
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Perhaps "Fox" is part of a dying breed
Maybe the Pentagon is just trying to plan ahead by getting the public relations contract taken care of now. After all, they can't be sure they'll have Fox News around to cheerlead for them forever.
This is especially true if the statistics coming out of www.mediabistro.com are correct; according to their report on primetime viewership numbers, Fox News lost 20% of its audience as compared against numbers from August 2005, while viewership at CNN and MSNBC for the same time period increased by 25% and 8%, respectively.
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Brain injuries versus mind control?
And where, you might ask, did the Pentagon find the $20 million planned for this new program?
Well, here's a program that may be CUT by $7 million, which represents over one-third of the needed funding. Reports started to circulate Tuesday after the Raleigh News & Observer broke this stunning story:
http://www.newsobserver.com/710/story/480210.html
Here are some excerpts from the story:
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"Brain injuries are so common among U.S. troops that they're called the signature injury of the Iraq war, but Congress is poised to cut military spending on researching and treating them.
House and Senate versions of the defense appropriation bill would chop funding for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center from $14 million to $7 million."
"The Pentagon asked only for $7 million and didn't respond properly when congressional staffers tried to find out whether it needed more money for the program, said Jenny Manley, a spokeswoman for the Senate appropriations committee."
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Seems like the Pentagon is perfectly fine with reductions in funding to research brain injuries suffered by members of our armed forces, and would rather spend that money (and more) on propaganda and mind CONTROL.
Revolting. How can these people, from Rumsfeld on down, look at themselves in the mirror?
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The Pentagon knows this will work because
this is exactly how Pres. Clinton reduced crime in America during the 1990's.
Well, not actually. Clinton put more police (troops) on the streets and gave the poor and the middle class a little more attention than they'd gotten in the previous 12 years.
Well. I guess it wasn't completely good news though. As the crime on the streets decreased the disaffected wealthy part of the population turned more to white collar crime that ended up being exposed in the 2000's.
Since the well off have fled Iraq, though, what are the chances that putting more troops on the streets and improving conditions of the Iraqis will save Iraq? Well, because the antagonists (US troops - because the US is despised in the Middle East) are the ones implimenting these measures, and have been trying to do it since May 2003 (doing it a better way since Jan. 2006) the militias that hate us will continue to sabotage every effort made to bring good conditions there.
Let's just forget the oil reason for getting in there in the first place, get out of Iraq and leave it to the Iraqis.
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We can monitor it ourselves, thanks, and a suggestion for making good news.
A few pennies to advertise the good news the Pentegon is spending trillions to produce -- this makes sense, especially since journalists are dying at record rates in order to prevent Americans from learning about the good news. But monitoring? What does monitoring accomplish?
Here's a better idea: stop fighting in Iraq and our military will have nothing to report there, and, of course, no news is good news.
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NYT Liberal?
Anybody remember Judith Miller at the New York Times? She beat the drums for war by printing every unsubstantiated tid bit Chalabi tossed her way. I think the myth that the NYT is liberal is a diabolical plot by the vast right wing conspiracy. War room, why do you buy it?
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The thing is...
They could offer to pay me 20 million dollars and I still don't think I could watch Fox news for more than an hour.
It's not even about politics - it's just not good TV.
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Outrageous
I don't understand why people are suspicious about this. Heck, the only reason Rumsfeld is paying people to make up good news is that it's too darn dangerous for reporters to walk around Iraq and find the good news themselves. And here the mainstream media is blaming the Pentagon for trying to save lives.
If all those reporters just stayed in their fancy New York offices and copied the press releases like they should, none of this "making up good news" stuff ever woulda had to happen. See, it's their fault again.
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You guys could do a better job than this topical commentary...
I remember being at the site of the Mount Lebanon Hotel car bombing in Baghdad (March 2004) approx. an hour after the explosion hit. As a journalis, I was made to wait 1/2 block away from the burning detonation site for a military spokesman to come out and brief us. At one point a soldier came from area and shouted to the 30 or so journalists waiting along with me, "Is there anyone from FOX News here?" Apparently FOX is the top dog in Iraq as far as the US military is concerned.
On the other hand, there were so many incredibly good things happening in Iraq on a daily basis - as I am sure there are now - that never made it into print or onto American TV sets. (I worked in Iraq on and off from Feb 2003 to Jan 2005). Living in unprotected hotels during most of my stays there, I ran across amazing stories of positive interactions between Iraqis and US soldiers, the rebuilding and construction efforts done by Iraqis themselves, the life threatening hardships undergone by Iraqis who were working to build a true democracy in Iraq, the ordinary tales of life in the market places and people going to work everyday. Having been in Iraq just before the bombing started and returning afterwards the changes for the better were enormous. People were talking openly about things they would have been dragged off and tortured for uttering before the invasion, internet cafes (unheard of under Saddam) were springing up on every other street, satellite dishes were sprouting on all buildings small and large, political parties were being formed or coming out from underground on a daily basis, and women’s groups were forming and protesting in the streets for equal voice in the newly forming government. The first election itself was inspiring to witness for this American who comes from a country where if it rains people will stay safe and dry in their homes on election day.
All of these things were put down or ignored because the Western view was they were happening under the touch of the American-backed government who held Iraqis on strings as if they were marionettes. Such posturing was at best, egregious slight to the capabilities and desires of the Iraqi people who were not made up of the Sunni-Shia black-white depiction so easily tossed around by ignorant minds and eyes of the media.
There are many reasons the “good things are happening” stories do not come out of Iraq. In my opinion it is the American public that colludes with the media outlets to stifle these stories. Why read or watch something about ordinary people doing ordinary things, albeit under the most extreme circumstances, when you can watch hours and hours of coverage about a group of white lacrosse players raping a black stripper (or single mother struggling to make it through college, depending on how one chooses to frame the story)? Or follow months of ever-increasingly boring minutia coverage of a pregnant (“white” ) woman whose husband tosses her dead body to the sea?
Those of us who saw the “good things happening on the ground” and tried to sell those stories had them passed by for the more “sexy” blood and dead bodies stories. (Although Foreign Policy did hire me to interview soldiers on whether what they saw in the news matched their experiences). Why? Because people enjoy and become riveted much more easily to the more sensational stories over the “feel good” ones, and bottom line, advertisers want the riveted viewer.
Whether the American public or the government, in the end, you get what you pay for.