Media Disinfo: Viet Nam, Iraq, and "The Wires"

It is a sad and dangerous development when supposedly objective news media yield to national pressure to slant the news in favor of the government.

This routinely happens in dictatorships at all times but it can happen in democracies as well, particularly in time of war. It was no surprise that, during the rape of Nanking, a correspondent for a Japanese daily paper wrote home giddily about a nauseating contest by two crazed officers to see which of them could be the first to behead a hundred Chinese prisoners! During the Second World War the Japanese press reflected government policy, and if the government was mad so was the press. Later, when Britain entered the war, a BBC broadcaster named George Orwell lied through his teeth to conceal the systematic bombing of German civilians by the RAF, and he wasn’t the only one.

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