Wednesday - November 05, 2003
"It is the dream of every young man to be a war correspondent. Isn't
it?"
That's the quote of some pretensious woman on the
television. I'm watching another of the innumerable television homages to the
so-called "wonderful heros," the war correspondents. I think there are more of
these shows than there are homages to the people who actually face danger
regularly to fight the wars. Some of this is interesting, some of it is
appropriate, but when Christianne Amanpour puts her mug on the screen and tells
us that only they can tell us what is happening in the world, I am sickened.
She compounded my revulsion by insisting that she and her colleagues were the
ones to interpret the world's events for us.
What makes this so especially vile a claim is the
revelation that CNN admitted that it purposefully became the propaganda machine
for Saddam Hussein. I hope no one ever forgets that CNN reporters were the only
western reporters allowed inside Iraq because they were the only ones that
promised to not tell the truth about Hussein's regime. They knew about the
reign of terror, the tortures, the fear and mutilations, yet they told no
one.
These are the people who keep
lionizing their own value to this
world.
The truth is that "journalism"
is not a special profession. The US Constitution's first amendment doesn't
grant "journalists" any special rights that the rest of us don't have. The
truth is that anyone can witness the truth and write about it, it is only the
"journalists" that have in the past 55 years granted themselves an aura of
authority to bill themselves as having some special insight that others can't
have. The basis of their claim is that they have studied at journalism school
and received a degree that means that they did less work and were taught less
than used to be common among high school graduates. People who couldn't be
bothered to spend their college years learning a real education have become the
self-proclaimed filters for our understanding of world -- and local --
events.
I can't say when it began, or
when it became dominant, but my impression is that this journalistic arrogance
began after the second world war. With the rise in power of the FCC, and the
difficulty of receiving alternative news sources for most people, their
arrogance was matched only by their power, not by their skill or objectiveness.
With the recent overt and filthy admission of treason of CNN in the years before
this recent war, regarding "journalists" with any degree of respect as a
profession can no longer be taken seriously. Yes, there are some that are
respectable as individuals, but they are the exception to the
rule.
Finally, free speech through the
internet is trumping the power of control over our information sources. When
reporters give their biased, ignorant, and foolish versions of events going on,
you can count on some local person who is more aware and better educated on the
matter to set their lies straight.
I
have little patience for these frequent homages to war correspondents. The news
writers shouldn't be the news, or even the history to a greater extent than the
people actually making the history are. Andy Rooney took a few flights on a
bomber in WWII, and people think he's a hero. I'm unimpressed. The people who
rode those bombers everyday, knowingly steering their craft into danger, were
the heros.
Okay, the show is still on
and I just finished screaming obscenities at the screen. Some effete
"journalist" just finished saying that the war correspondents were brave by
choice. The infantrymen who had to stick their heads around corners and get
shot at were not as brave, because they had no choice, they had to be there.
The journalists were braver than the soldiers! He actually said this, and some
editor put it on the show! This is why I hate journalists. This is the twisted
and warped view of the world that they are so arrogant to claim is our world
view. Without them, they believe, we would know nothing. The truth is that
despite them, we try to understand what is happening because they are so often
wrong about basic facts and the simplest shades of understanding. What kind of
sick mind thinks that a man who stands nearby with a camera is braver than the
ones in front of him who have to run into the on coming bullets to stop the
enemy from shooting?
I'm too sickened
to continue. Thank god for the internet. The unchallenged power of these
intellectual midgets is ending.
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