Did you read the article to the end? No one entity controls the media.
The article is about efforts of the administration and the pentagon to try and sell the idea of a new kind of warfare that causes very little collateral damage while maximum destruction of the enemy and it's assets.
The point of the article is that while the administration was putting out information that was tailored to make American forces look great and to make American success and enemy failure look exaggerated the journalists and the media were accepting this information without double checking it, so the media, especially in America was putting out a distorted view of the war that was not reflected in other media around the world. Hence a perception gap was created.
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In addition to US and allied losses, approximately 18,000 Afghan and Iraqi combatants and non-combatants were killed during the main combat phases of the two wars.
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These 2 wars did not last years, they lasted a few weeks (the main combat operations) and in that time period 18,000 people died, these number still do not differ from the wars of history, had these wars lasted a year or two the number of casualties would be the same as any war at the rate of destruction.
But did you see any of the American media focus on any of these deaths? Did you see the same amount of reporting about the destruction in Iraq as you did about the courageous American soldiers who were successful but 'humane' soldiers?
I have CNN and FOX NEWS too, I can compare them to the French, European and Arab media that I watch daily on TV (through our satellite dish) and read daily (internet, newspapers). The differences were staggering to me.
While European and Arab channels were reporting both sides of the story, CNN and FOX showed staged reports of American soldiers by embedded journalists.
And whenever they did report about casualty reports they were quick to place the seed of doubt in these reports so as to make the viewers skeptical.
Such as reports showing American soldiers ducking behind rocks and armored vehicles shooting at targets that don't fire back while the camera men were running around in between the soldiers as if they were out on some family pick nick.
There were even European documentaries about American journalists and how their reports differed.
For example an ex-nato officer was shown footage from American media, it showed soldiers walking through a field, next to a burnt out Iraqi tank, other soldiers were shooting at a building far away in the distance, the reporter said that there Iraqi snipers shooting at the soldiers, the funny thing was that some of the soldiers carried pistols. The officer went on to explain that when you are trying to take out an enemy sniper you don't use a pistol due to the short range, the sniper will be using a weapon that allows him to be far away.
So it was obvious that these were staged events for media consumption, and I saw quite a few myself so I can relate to what this article is talking about.
On to the next point, since 18,000 non-americans died in Afghanistan and Iraq, did you every see an adequate media coverage in America? Did the large media organisations that dominate the scene spend the same amount of time on these realities as they did on their 'embedded information' and that which they were told by the pentagon?
Read the section about the Iraqi marketplace bombings, most Americans will still believe that the bombing was caused by an Iraqi missile, this was the official pentagon report that was regurgitated by CNN and similar massive media organisations.
The funny thing is that even after Robert Fisk found parts of American missiles and traced the serial numbers on them back to the Naval Air System Command and Raytheon, manufacturer of AGM-88 HARM anti-radar missiles, the media stuck to the pentagon 'approved' story.
But a twist was added, the Iraqi government was blamed for placing it's army in the capital city. Feeble minded people and journalists did not bother to ask how countries that lack Americas high-tech weaponry and mouse-click battle-fields can protect their capital cities
without placing their armies in their cities? For those that forgot most of Iraq's long range weaponry was destroyed in accordance with UN sanctions, most not all. So the Iraqis can't place their armies thousands of km's outside their cities.
But such critical questions were not asked by the mass media.
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The coalition's objections to Iraqi air defense tended to obscure or distract from the determinant factors that shaped the threat to civilians, which were:
A war that aims to topple a regime is likely to entail some sort of urban combat or attack -- at least involving the capital city.
Wars fought for maximum objectives -- such as national sovereignty or regime survival -- tend to be fought intensely, even desperately. In such cases, considerations of military necessity will weigh heavily against concerns about collateral damage.
Regardless of political objectives, any method of war that emphasizes aerial bombardment including attacks on urban, political, and dual-use targets is going to turn cities into air combat zones, involving intense duels between ground attack and air defense systems.
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Consider that around 20,000 guided air-delivered weapons were used in the Iraq war.
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...Among these weapons, CEPs ranged between 3 and 15 meters, with the mean being approximately 8 meters or 25 feet. This is sufficiently inaccurate to guarantee that a significant percentage of weapons aimed at the center of a building will land in the street -- or in the building next door. Moreover, even given perfect intelligence and accuracy, most guided weapons in the 500- to 2000-pound range are sufficiently powerful to routinely cause some degree of collateral damage. These weapons will destroy almost everything within a radius of 60 to 105 feet...
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Did the media focus on this at all? Did they invest the time and money that they invest on how cruel the enemy is?
Consider also that the pentagon claims it is waging modern war with very few casualties, so one would hope that they are basing this on some kind of statistics, if they do have statistics then they obviously have the means to collect this data during combat operations, but when Rumsfeld was asked about collateral damage and enemy damage statistics he claimed it was not possible to collect statistics and also not helpful to do so, for Gods sake, if the US army can't and doesn't collect statistics, how on Earth do they that they are the creators a modern 'clean' type of warfare?
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Exemplifying this agnosticism were Secretary Rumsfeld's assertions that it was "next to impossible to get factual information about civilian casualties." At a 5 December 2001 press conference he counseled reporters "to be sensitive to how difficult it is to know with certainty, in real time, what may have happened in any given situation in Afghanistan." Similarly, during the Iraq conflict, CENTCOM deputy director of operations General Vincent Brooks asserted that "the number of casualties is a figure that can never be completely well-determined." Asked to give a preliminary estimate of casualties, Brooks declined, saying that "I don't think that in any case of recorded history of warfare a full knowledge of all casualties and all secondary effects has ever been gained."
The administration's espousal of casualty agnosticism turns on phrases like "completely well-determined," "known with certainty," and "full knowledge of all casualties and all secondary effects." Of course, it is true that it is impossible to calculate a casualty figure that is both absolutely certain and precise. But this truth is a facile one; it holds not only for the Afghan and Iraq conflicts but for all wars and genocides. Nonetheless, some of the casualty estimates associated with these events are widely accepted as sufficiently accurate to usefully inform policy.
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Critical thinking is not hard, anyone can do it:
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Along these lines Lt. Col. Dave Lapan (USMC), a Pentagon spokesperson explained:
It's not a useful figure to us. It's not a measure of effectiveness.... It doesn't really matter militarily how many Iraqi soldiers may be killed.
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So how do you know that your weapons are causing little collateral damage if these 'figures are not important' ?
I could go on, but I think the point is too obvious.
And a final point, think about all the political discussions and debates we have had on the forum, think about how our American members have reacted to articles and comments about the collateral and civilian damage reports in Iraq and Afghanistan, those who posted such articles and opinions were (and still are) labeled as feeble minded America-haters.
But I guess this article is just 'crap' as you said
And if I remember correctly most (if not all) the articles of ciritcal nature have come not from the mass media but from smaller platforms that don't enjoy the money and the closeness to the political establishment.
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