THE WAR YOU DON'T SEE

Modern reporting has been put to shame by distinguished journalist Jon Pilger in his new film The War You Don't See.

Pilger shows how deeply the press failed in its duty to keep the public informed during the Iraq war and how complicit it was with Govt. My jaw dropped when the BBC said it's duty was to report for the government and what the Government says but didn't think it necessary to use information from non-embedded journalists out in the field to give the real picture.

I suspect standards in journalism have fallen partly because of the need for instant news 24/7 and partly because the new breed of journalists just don't scrutinise things in the way that Pilger's generation did. Instead they meet constant deadlines with whatever they've got at the time.

Add to that the competitive nature of the industry which at it's soul is business. Reporters need contacts and Govt uses that need to keep journalists compliant and tame which fills column inches and keeps editors happy.

The British and American press let Bliar and Bush get away with war crimes and even encouraged them to an extent for not wanting to look behind what they were fed by junior ministers and civil servants who had to look as if they had balls to their respective administrations.

The press wanted to believe the Iraqis saw us as their saviours but they weren't showing the body parts of bombed children being buried in mass graves. They weren't showing us sons being dragged from their homes and shot against the wall, the torture, the men gunned down in the street by a US helicopter crew for fun.

Neither did they say that the affect of the "Shock and Awe" bombing of Baghdad was like the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.

Not one more life should be lost for that war. Not British, not Iraqi, not American. The Iraqi people should be allowed to begin to rebuild their country in peace. The thousands of spaces being created on the UK national memorial for war dead should not be carved with another young sacrifice to Bliar and Bush's campaign.

It's time we were out. Now is soon enough. The media should be making a bigger noise and could if it stopped filling acres of newsprint and hours of airtime on vacuous celebrities and phoney lifestyle issues. It actually could do something to help save lives that really need saving while protecting children who really need protection from being blown up and disfigured or murdered by a shameful war.

The media is also turning a blind eye to the atrocities happening in Israel against the Palestinians because they fear the Israeli state. Another programme I watched recently was a historical documentary about World War II. It struck me as I watched the pitiful inhumane acts committed by zealots against skeletal men, women, children and babies, that if those victims of the holocaust visited our time they would be appalled at the way their countrymen treat other human beings.

I am sure they would compromise and share and want to build bridges and strong friendships not teach generation after generation that war and violence is the only solution. Their memory stands as testament that it is not.

Fascism is with us in the mainstream leadership of the western world again and the press either hasn't noticed because it is safe in its bubble, or it just doesn't recognise fascism unless it's leaders wear uniform and kill Jews, women and homosexuals.

Of course this New World has all been achieved through the use of propaganda and some of us on a domestic scale know exactly how damaging that can be and how dangerous it is when journalists ignore half the story.