infobong.com

No doubt in my mind that quite a bit of everything we see on the news is staged, exaggerated, and manipulated... particularly when the embedded journalists, et al. have a very rigid set of rules to follow. Of course, I would have to wonder what incentive a media outlet would have to NOT show how small the statue-toppling event might have been (and, since I wasn't there, I can only rely on circumstantial evidence that it WAS as small as this article suggests... ex. When, exactly, was that blurry wide-shot taken?)

Robert Jensen, who worked for papers before his teaching career, would say that large, institutional outlets like CNN and MSNBC have a few reasons to go along with the government's perspective, mostly dealing with the status of these organizations as profit-seeking entities. I haven't read his books or taken one of his classes, so I don't feel comfortable trying to say what he would say.

I'll offer a few ideas, that aren't really mine, but stuff I read in grad school. First, journalists who work with powerful institutions like the US government, avoid pissing off their sources because it might keep them from getting stories in the future, reducing their prestige as a news organization. Secondly, individual journalists get wrapped up in the prestige of reporting on powerful people and begin to identify with their sources and tend to side with them. These two ideas are basically from Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching. A third reason, is that many media, particularly TV, need to wrap events up in tidy little packages, and "toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein" seems to be the preferred way of presenting the war to viewers. (This is the tidbit I caught from Jensen) Television in particular is bad at nuance: some media studies types will argue that the only room TV has for contradiction and irony is in the commercials. Finally, because of the competition between cable channels, I'm certain there is the fear that a critical look at the information our leaders want us to see will alienate viewers and move to Fox News or another cable channel.

I don't know when that picture was taken, and the site is obviously run by left-leaning skeptics. I will say, David, that I chose to link that site instead of another, since the ideologies are on the surface, making it clear it should be read with a grain of salt.

That Info Clearing House site is terrific (and shocking -- I know I was taken in by the media blitz that day, since it included relatively reliable sources like NPR). But it would be a lot more useful if it included more information about its sources and corroborating information from other sources. We should all know not to trust any single photo in this day of PhotoShop (not that PhotoShop didn't have plenty of pre-digital antecedents -- see the fascinating history of image manipulation The Reconfigured Eye by William Mitchell).