Friday, March 19, 2004

journalism... ?

"'A lot of French journalists are shit,' Wady, the sculptor, observed one afternoon as we shared a narghile filled with apple-flavored tobacco. 'They come here and talk against the U.S. in a stupid way. They don’t care about the crimes of Saddam Hussein.' And it’s not only the French, noted Esam Pasha, a painter and translator for the U.S. military: 'European and Arab journalists talk to us, but they don’t care about our happiness in being liberated. They only want us to make anti-American comments.' Even a cabbie who took me to the Shabander one afternoon weighed in. 'Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia TV, no good,' he said. 'They only show pictures of bombings and killings of Americans -- always how things are bad in Iraq, never how they are getting better.'

"Worse, I heard many stories at the Shabander about foreign correspondents staging news events to discredit the U.S. One young man introduced me to a Spanish photographer who, he later reported, had just finished posing an Iraqi woman in a nearby pile of rubble looking plaintively toward heaven, as if seeking deliverance from U.S. bombs. Rasim, the painter, claimed he witnessed Arab TV journalists pay idle Iraqis to light a car on fire and throw rocks to create an 'anti-American' demonstration. 'These journalists come here with their minds already made up,' he groused. 'They’re not interested in anything that contradicts their anti-American viewpoint.'"
Steven Vincent in this month's Reason. (Hat tip: the Web-majestic Erik Svane.)

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