Submitted by John Stauber on
"Bush administration officials and U.S. news media chiefs met on a rain-swept Civil War battlefield on Wednesday to honor four American journalists who died in Iraq and Pakistan while reporting on the U.S. war on terrorism. ... Honored were Daniel Pearl ... and three journalists who traveled with U.S. fighting units in Iraq this year -- Michael Kelly of the Atlantic Monthly and Washington Post, David Bloom of NBC and Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe. ... Not mentioned were the five journalists killed by U.S. forces in Iraq, or the Pentagon's unwillingness to release details about its shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad that killed two reporters and the Aug. 17 death of a Reuters TV cameraman, Mazen Dana. (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul) Wolfowitz declined to comment. 'I suspect what's happening here is that the Pentagon wants very much to continue its successful cultivation of U.S. journalists that began with the embeds,' John Stauber, co-author of the book Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, told Reuters in a telephone interview. ... Last month, top U.S. Army officers admitted using news coverage by embeds to achieve military goals in Iraq. A day before the April 8 shelling of the Palestine Hotel, tanks from the same unit carried embedded reporters on a "thunder run" through Baghdad to show the world that the city was under U.S. control."
Printer-friendly version