Online polls are notoriously unscientific, but the corporate media loves them
-- unless the wrong guy wins, of course.
When antiwar Rep. Ron Paul won an MSNBC online poll, it was yanked off their website faster than you can say 'the corporate media are rightwing shills.' The poll showed that the Texas Congressman won the Tuesday night GOP Michigan debate in a landslide, getting 86% of the online vote.
In explaining their decision, CNBC managing editor Allen Wastler said it was because Paul supporters "flooded" the poll and it was his duty to pull it because "I haven't seen him pull those kind of numbers in any 'legit' poll."
Unh huh.
But if a corporate favorite like Rudy Giuliani had got those numbers?
U.S. troops backed by attack aircraft killed 19 suspected insurgents and 15 civilians northwest of Baghdad today. Nine of the dead were children.
Notice that the military dispatch said the "insurgents" were "suspected insurgents." That means, of course, that undoubtedly some of them were not fighters but were also civilians.
Antiwar.com keeps a running tab on the Iraq war. Today, for example, the death toll was:
89 Iraqis
1 GI
That's pretty much the norm. In a war we started, in a country we occupy, the death toll is usually more than 50 Iraqis to 1 American, sometimes a lot more.
And the dead American is usually a soldier; most of the Iraqi dead are civilians.
Why is nobody outraged?
There are numerous reasons for that ratio. Some of those died without any Americans present in the civil war that we refuse to acknowledge is happening. But far too many are directly killed by American forces.
I repeat: Why is nobody outraged at this wanton slaughter?
"The residents of a remote northern Wisconsin community," AP says, "struggled to understand Monday how a sheriff's deputy who killed six young people and critically wounded another could have become a law enforcement officer."
Good question, but an even better one is why AP and the rest of corporate media never seem to worry about things like that when it comes to an aging monster in Washington. I suggest a story that begins:
"The residents of the United States struggled to understand Monday how a man who killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousand Iraqis people could have become president."
I was considering commenting on the power of the Israeli Lobby in light of all the fuss about the book the book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I had seen a bit of that power myself when I worked as a newsman.
I began with a Google search for a couple of incidents I personally knew about, one of them being the shooting down of a civilian airliner in the 70s. I don't know whether I has anything to do with the power of the Israel lobby today, but I had a devil of a time finding any information with Google and Ask.com, and some of that came from anti-Semitic websites, not the best of sources.
Finally I found some good information from a website called Swans, written by the fellow called Deck Deckert. [g] I had written the piece, The Untouchable Israelis, on April 8, 2002. It started:
"There are a lot of taboos and untouchable stories in the Establishment Media -- corporate crime, racism, the insanity of the failed drug war, criticism of the war budget, corporate control of government, Bush gaffes, etc..
"But one of the oldest and currently the most powerful taboo is this: One must never speak ill of Israel. No matter how savage or barbaric Israel's actions, the American media, following the example of the American government, offers unquestioning support.
"The key word is 'unquestioning' -- no criticism, no expressions of doubt. Anyone who dares express the mildest criticism of Israel is likely to be hit with the nuclear bomb of public discourse -- a label of anti-Semitism."
I went on to relate a couple of personal incidents I had witnessed as a newsman, including that airliner downing. On Feb. 21, 1973, Israeli fighter planes shot down a Libyan civilian airliner, killing all on board. It wasn't the downing of an airliner — there have been numerous incidents of airliners being shot down in war zones --- it was the aftermath.
As I said in the Swans piece, "When the story broke, I passed it on to the news editor and prepared to handle the updates and the sidebars ... I was expecting details about weather conditions that contributed to the crash, profiles of some of the people who died, interviews with their families, analysis of why Israel would shoot down an airliner, comments from U.S. and Israeli authorities and public figures. I waited in vain. Updates were sparse, sidebars nearly non-existent. ...the story was essentially a one-edition splash and then disappeared."
In contrast, when 10 years later the Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner, the media and politicians became hysterical. They averred that the incident was proof that the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire. TV newscasts and newspapers were filled with stories about the depravity of the Soviets, features about the passengers lost in the shootdown, and the condemnation by politicians and pundits of all types. The story went on for weeks.
But Israel has always escaped that kind of scrutiny in America.
Anyone interested in reading the whole story I wrote on Swans five years ago, can find it at:
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/rdeck018.html