De Commerciele Massamedia 10

Sophie McNeill is a freelance video journalist whose work regularly appears on Australia’s SBS Television “Dateline” program. She lives in New York. In Information Clearing House schrijft ze: 'Normalizing the UnthinkableJohn Pilger, Robert Fisk, Charlie Glass, and Seymour Hersh on the failure of the world’s press.

The late journalist Edward R. Murrow might well have been rolling in his grave on April 21. That’s because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a lecture that day in Washington, DC to journalists at the Department of State’s official Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists. For the Bush administration to use the memory of a person who stood up to government propaganda is ironic to say the least. Secretary Rice told the assembled journalists that “without a free press to report on the activities of government, to ask questions of officials, to be a place where citizens can express themselves, democracy simply couldn’t work.”One week earlier in New York City, Columbia University hosted a panel on the state of the world’s media that would have been more in Murrow’s style than the State Department-run symposium. Reporter and filmmaker John Pilger, British Middle East correspondent for the Independent Robert Fisk, freelance reporter Charlie Glass, and investigative journalist for the New Yorker Seymour Hersh appeared together at this April 14 event.Before the afternoon panel began, I met up with John Pilger at his hotel. He’d just flown in from London and was only in New York for the panel before flying to Caracas, Venezuela the next day. A journalist for over 30 years, Pilger has reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Palestine, and Iraq—to name a few of the countries to which his investigative reporting and filmmaking had taken him. Pilger told me that he’d never been as concerned about the state of the media as he was today. “I think there’s a lot of reasons to be very concerned about the information or the lack of information that we get. There’s never been such an interest, more than an interest, almost an obsession, in controlling what journalists have to say.”Despite the fact that the war in Iraq is reported daily in most U.S. newspapers and networks around the world, Pilger didn’t think the world’s press accurately conveyed the reality of life for Iraqi civilians. “We get the illusion that we are seeing what might be happening in Iraq. But what we’re getting is a massive censorship by omission; so much is being left out,” he said. “We have a situation in Iraq where well over 100,000 civilians have been killed and we have virtually no pictures. The control of that by the Pentagon has been quite brilliant. And as a result we have no idea of the extent of civilians suffering in that country.”I asked Pilger what the untold story of Iraq was that’s just not getting through. “Well, the untold story of Iraq should be obvious,” Pilger said. “But it never is. The untold story of Vietnam was that it was an invasion and that huge numbers of civilians were killed. And in effect it was a war against civilians and that was never told and that’s exactly true of Iraq.”With the majority of the world’s press holed up behind 4.5 miles of concrete barrier in the green zone, it seems impossible for the standard of reporting to improve anytime in the near future. I asked Pilger if he blamed journalists for not wanting to put their lives at risk? “No, I can’t,” he said. “But I don’t see the point of being in the green zone. I don’t see the point of wearing a flak jacket and standing in a hotel in a fortress guarded by an invader.“But there have been journalists—and others—who have actually gone with the insurgents; who have reported about them. One of them, for instance, is a young woman named Jo Wilding, a British human rights worker. She was in Fallujah all through that first attack in 2004. Jo Wilding’s dispatches were some of the most extraordinary I’ve read, but they were never published anywhere.”Pilger said the mainstream press needs to get over its hang up of “our man in Baghdad” and prioritize whatever information can be obtained by whoever is brave enough or has the best contacts. “There are sources of information for what is happening inside Iraq. Most of them are on the web. I think those who give a damn in the mainstream really have to look at those sources and surrender their prejudice about them and say we need that reporter’s work because he or she has told us something we can’t possibly get ourselves. And I think that’s the only way we will really serve the public.”We had talked too long and had to quickly jump in a cab to make it to the panel on time. The hall was packed with university students, professors, and the public.' Lees verder: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13492.htm