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Reporter accuses Bush administration of censoring and controlling US media
Gerard Jackson
The intrepid leftwing Marian Wilkinson of the Melbourne Age, aka the Spencer Street Soviet, claims to have discovered evidence that the Bush administration basically controls the US media, which will be quite a surprise to the likes of Peter Jennings and Dan Rather (US media treads Government line 25/3).
The administration asked the media not to broadcast Baghad's propaganda tapes of US POWs, and, surprisingly enough, they seemed to oblige. This is Wilkinson's evidence that the White House controls the US media.
She confirms her conspiracy (or is it paranoia?) with the observation that the US government did not object to " graphic pictures of surrendering, captured, dead or dying Iraqi soldiers." All very true, but totally irrelevant. These were battlefield pictures and not tapes of captured Iraqis being humiliated and terrorised. The former is not against the Geneva Convention but the latter is.
Providing us with what anti-American reporters consider evidence she claimed that "there is scant coverage of the casualties or wounded" from the attacks on Baghdad. Maybe, little Miss Wilkinson, that might have something to do with there being very few casualties to report.
Wilkinson is insinuating that the media is covering up massive civilian casualties in Baghdad so as to not embarrass President Bush, Blair and Howard. But she knows damn well that if such casualties existed Iraqi Television and al-Jazeera would be broadcasting them across the planet, including her Baghdad-based colleague Paul McGeough
That hardline Fedayeen and Republican Guards placed themselves in civilian locations and used women and children as decoys did not rate a mention by Wilkinson, any more than the Regime's violations of the Geneva Convention did.
I shall leave it up to readers to figure out for themselves why Wilkinson made no references to the regime's attempts to maximise civilian casualties.
In a rancid effort to defend her baseless accusations she said that most reporters "seem to accept Mr Rumsfeld's line that 'precision guided' bombs do not really hurt civilians in Baghdad."
Rumsfeld made no such statement and that makes the Bush-hating Wilkinson a calculating liar.
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