Saturday, March 15, 2008

Searching for Iraq War news

I was thinking about Juan Cole's suggestion that bloggers could post news videos about the Iraq War to make up (a tiny bit) for the fact that the TV networks, true to form, are falling down badly on reporting the war news.

So I went to the CBS News Web site (03/15/08) to see what I could find. The first one I found in their video list - under "World", not under the main video page - was this:



Yes, it's Jessica Simpson. The video caption from CBS says, "'Showbuzz RAW': Jessica Simpson performed for U.S. troops waiting to be deployed to Iraq in Kuwait. Simpson performed U.S. anthems and hit songs for a concert that was also streamed over MySpace."

In other words, it's an entertainment piece, not news about the war. Now I have nothing against Jessica Simpson going over to perform for the troops in Kuwait. On the contrary, I think it's great. (She's no Britney Spears, though, let me tell you!) But the piece tells us zippo about the war going on in Iraq. In fact, the footage is apparently all from her visit in Kuwait. It's not really about Iraq at all.

Then I found one actually about the war, with news from Tuesday 03/11/08:



The caption says, "Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in separate attacks in Iraq, the worst one-day death toll for coalition troops in months. Charlie D'Agata reports from London." The video of 1 min., 42 seconds, includes a clip of our Dear Leader Bush explaining that our job in Iraq is to protect the innocent. (I thought it was to find those terribly threatening weapons of mass destruction.) The first 42 seconds is actually devoted to news from events in the war itself.

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