Tag Archives: The Media

A headline is a powerful thing

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The European Court of Human Rights is not an EU body. You’re reading a blog that focusses on European poltics, so you almost certainly already know this. But, it seems, the vast majority of people do not. More importantly, far too many journalists and editors do not. This, from this morning, for example:

Press Association, 19th February 2009

News headlines are powerful things. They are, after all, the only part of the story that the vast majority of people will read – sometimes read without even realising it while passing news-stands (Ken Livingstone’s team, notably, complained about the subliminal impact of pro-Boris Johnson headlines in the Evening Standard during last year’s London mayoral elections) or, in this age of the internet, while skimming through a website.

Headlines exist for three reasons: a) (obviously) to act as markers for where new items begin, b) to convince people to read a story (increasingly important in the current age of page views and web advertising), and c) to pander to the audience’s prejudices (thus reaffirming the connection the audience feels with their publication of choice). This is why the Sun’s headline writers are notoriously paid such vast sums of money – no matter how much you may dislike that paper’s approach, they excel at the snappy headline that sells papers and builds reader loyalty. That’s why it’s the most popular newspaper in the UK.

But the vast majority of headline-writers are not well-paid Sun subs. They’re underpaid and – increasingly – overworked hacks. Along with writing headlines and checking the spelling, grammar and punctuation of lazy writers*, subs have also long been responsible for both fact-checking. When a sub cocks something up, that’s usually it. They are the last defence against error.

And yet more and more newspapers are dumping their sub-editors. More and more errors are starting to creep in. And more and more newspapers and websites are relying on agency copy rather than their own, original content.

This is why the above example of confusion about the status of the European Court of Human Rights is worth flagging. This originated from a Press Association newsfeed this morning. A Press Association newsfeed that is automatically reproduced on hundreds of websites, which in turn receive millions of page views.

“EU judges to rule on Qatada case”, it says – referencing the attempts of the suspected al Qaida organiser to avoid being deported from the UK to face possible torture in Jordan, a possibility thanks to breaching his bail conditions, even though he previously won an appeal against deportation under the terms of the UK Human Rights Act in April last year.

But, of course, with headlines the details are unimportant. Headlines are all about inspiring an initial, gut reaction from the audience to draw them in to read more. And for a certain section of the population, seeing that “the EU” is going to have final say over whether a man dubbed “the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Europe” gets to stay in the UK is likely to inspire one gut reaction above all others: anger.

Yet the EU has nothing to do with this. The Council of Europe, certainly; but not the EU. And yet for the casual browser of news sites, the impression will have been left that the EU somehow has control over the UK’s immigration and security policy; that the EU has powers that it does not possess.

Or, at least, they would have done had I not been on news duty this morning for one of those sites that relies on PA copy, and asked them to change the headline to remove any misleading references to the EU.

It is ignorance and misunderstandings like this as much as any deliberate effort to twist stories for political ends that is distorting the debate about the EU in the UK. If even the news agencies are making such errors, what hope for the increasingly under-staffed newspapers (the few staff that remain increasingly being young, inexperienced and cheap), or the websites that replicate agency copy – often via entirely automated systems?

If I hadn’t been on news duty for one of the sites that carried PA copy this morning, would anyone else have spotted the mistake? Would any other hack online news editor have known that it is the European Court of Justice that is the EU body? Would they even have bothered to check the body copy of the story? I doubt it. Because one of the other joys of this new age of agency copy is that if you alter it, it becomes yours*; if, however, you leave it as it is to publish through your automatic systems, you are immune from prosecution should that copy contain a libel. Editors are, in other words, actively discouraged from editing agency copy.

And so the power of the likes of the Press Association and Reuters begins to increase exponentially – and their ability to shape political debate grows with it. But while the public’s scrutiny of the press has grown massively in recent years with the advent of the likes of blogging and comments on articles, allowing readers to hold the press to account almost instantly, the press’ own scrutiny of its content is diminishing to its lowest ever level.

If an agency can get wrong something as basic as the international body a court belongs to, what else are they getting wrong? What other mistakes are slipping through the journalistic net now that the subs and experienced, subject-specialist editors are being jettisoned? And how are these mistakes going to shape our political discourse?

A headline is a powerful thing. A misleading headline can be a dangerous one.

* I’ve worked (and continue to work) as both writer and sub, so I can say this with confidence: subs are always necessary – and it’s impossible to sub your own copy.

** As an irrelevant aside, one of the joys of this is that I’ve read some of my own film reviews (done for an agency over the last several years) published in newspapers under other people’s names, with only one or two words altered.

Intriguing European history initiative

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Sounds promising, from Russian human rights organisation (yes, there are such things) Memorial – recently raided by armed police. These guys are still on the frontline of history, while those of use sitting comfortably in Western Europe can, bar the odd credit crisis, often feel as if Fukuyama may have had a point.

In any case, at its most basic the fun of history was always – for me – the competing accounts of what happened, and the sheer inability of pretty much any source to be free of bias. It’s invaluable journalistic training, history – if more journalists did history at university, the quality of the press would be vastly improved. You come, Rashomon-like, to distrust every account, and so hunt for as many different primary sources as possible to get the full picture. Accept one version of history, and you risk ending up like the blind men and the elephant. (Which is why, of course, Holocaust deniers shouldn’t be outlawed. Theirs is an alternate take on history, and can – despite being just about as categorically, demonstrably wrong as it is possible for an historical theory to be – merely by existing prompt new research and new approaches that may be able to cast light on one of the murkiest episodes of human history. Flawed hypotheses need to be disproved, not banned.)

So the new Memorial European history initiative reported by Eurozine strikes me as well worth supporting:

The twentieth century left deep and unhealed wounds in the memory of almost all nations in eastern and central Europe. Often, the memory of one nation contradicts that of another. If these disparities are recognised and understood, the historical awareness of each society is enriched. If not, they can be exploited for political ends.

Some of the specifics given in the article raise some vital issues about the ongoing post-WWII, post-Soviet recovery of Central and Eastern Europe that it’s all too easy to forget in the West – with many more older Eurozine articles well worth another look in the boxout on the right, such as Isolde Charim’s Historical Myths Old and New (very good on the EU’s “foundation myth” and failure to reconcile East and West).

Europe needs to confront its bloody past openly and honestly if it is ever going to move forward as one. Yet so much of our history we fail to understand – or even learn about. Too many historical myths continue largely unchallenged in the national consciousness of every country, from the old one of Magna Carta in the UK to the newer one of the Resistance in France. Yet without an honest, open understanding of our pasts – both individual and collective – how can we possibly hope to build a better future?

The state of EU debate

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A subject worth another look every year or so – especially with EU elections looming in 2009 – is what sort of discussion (if any) the European Union is inspiring among its citizens. After all, I remain top Google result for “EU debate” (and second only to the EU’s own Debate Europe forum without the inverted commas), and the nature of political discourse surrounding the EU was one of the reasons I first started blogging about the whole thing. (Largely to slag off some of the nuttier anti-EU types, at first, but I’ve expanded a bit since then…)

I last had a look at EU debate nine months ago, which provides a fairly handy overview of how nothing much has changed during the time I’ve been blogging (Don’t believe me? Here’s a post on the subject from four years ago) – and that followed an intensive series of posts on the possibilities for building a genuine European demos that I did for openDemocracy (that’s the thing that I got shortlisted for that Reuters award for).

As such, for me to do another post on the subject is largely redundant. Thankfully, however, the newly revamped Kosmopolito (at an all new address and with an extra vowel) has had a stab, and brings a different, yet complimentary, take to the whole thing. One point in particular that stands out, however:

It is still cumbersome for non-experts to monitor the EU decision making process. Especially the internet and new online tools have the potential to make it easier to monitor and control EU decision making processes. Even though the europa.eu portal contains most of the information, it needs a serious relaunch. A new EU portal needs to be transparent, with a focus on policy processes that makes it easy to follow documents, combined with some interactive elements.

This cannot be stressed enough. I’m actively interested in the EU. I’ve been blogging about it for five years. I know my way around most of the sources of EU information available online, and I know (roughly) where to start looking to delve deeper into particular subjects. Yet even I still find it difficult to find what I’m looking for sometimes. (Where is an EU equivalent of TheyWorkForYou or The Public Whip? The only thing similar is Brussel Stemt, a Dutch-language site tracking the votes of Dutch MEPs – as far as I’m aware there’s nothing else out there.) The Europa portal has a near impossible task in trying to provide so much information in so many different languages, certainly, but it remains one of the most confusing, unintuitive sites on the web.

One of the major reasons why Euromyths spread so quickly – and also why the Lisbon Treaty has sparked so much opposition – is that the people find it impossible to find out information about the EU for themselves. (As noted the other day, to argue against the classic straight bananas Euromyth necessitates hunting down an obscure EU regulation and then trawling through and attempting to understand seven pages of legal jargon. Far easier just to believe what your newspaper tells you.)

If information is hard to come by or hard to understand, the power of the press and other self-professed experts to influence public opinion is massively increased. When the experts and the press are themselves ill-informed (as most journalists writing about the EU and many national politicians commenting on it sadly are) or biased (as is certainly often the case in the UK), the public is – intentionally or otherwise – going to be misled and misinformed. A misled and misinformed public in turn leads to misinformed debate, and that to an ineffective democracy. (Indeed, it’s arguable that part of the reason the public are so uninterested in the EU is that they’ve been consistently misinformed about just how important it is to their daily lives – if only they knew, claim some eurosceptics, they’d be up in arms.)

I’m afraid I can’t see this situation changing any time soon. EU debates outside the Brussels beltway remain largely non-existent, dominated by lack of solid factual knowledge and understanding (by both sides) and a lack of interest from anyone bar obsessives (as Jon Worth noted is still the case as recently as June, and as I’ve been saying for years). Hell, sometimes even the obsessives aren’t that interested.

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UK political blogs just aren’t profitable

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And so another attempt to make money out of someone blathering on about politics has failed, with the closure of Westmonster.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so…

Note to any other wannabe online publishers thinking of starting a UK politics blog: don’t bother. The audience figures even for the biggest aren’t sufficiently high (certainly in terms of uniques) to warrant any advertiser forking out anywhere near enough money to make such ventures profitable. The only way to make money via British blogging is adapting the long tail model, stealing some ideas out of AdSense’s book, and setting up an advertising platform across numerous blogs. Only Blogads has already done that – and the UK version, MessageSpace, is backed by some of those self-same big boys of the UK blog world.

Or, of course, you could lobby for funding and sponsorship – seems to work for places like EurActiv, that’d never (that I can see) be able to survive on advertising revenue alone. But the thing to remember is this: if newspapers only had political news in them, they’d swiftly go bankrupt.

Blogging about blogging

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Someone got in touch to ask some questions about citizen journalism and the July 2005 London terrorist attacks. My response ended up getting rather lengthy as I went off on one, so I reckoned I may as well post it. Could prove interesting to some, even if it is another of those blogging about blogging things I thought I’d stopped doing. Continue reading →

The state of British EU news coverage

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I may well have only made the shortlist for the UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Award because the selection panel felt that in this day and age they needed a web-only publication to be sufficiently down with the kids (at least, I assume that’s why I’m on there alongside people like the Europe Editors of the BBC and The Economist…) – but the fact that I am on there at all demonstrates one of the fundamental problems at the heart of Britain’s turbulent relationship with the EU.

A Sun classicBecause, you see, the Reporting Europe Award is designed “to honour a leading journalist whose writing and reporting on Europe has made a real impact”. Now, by no stretch of the imagination am I a leading journalist. Nor have I had a huge impact, even in the small world that is online discussion about European and EU politics.

But think about it a moment. Bar Mark Mardell, by far the highest profile Europe/EU-focussed journalist in the UK (and my fellow shortlistee) thanks to occasionally cropping up on the BBC news of an evening while we’re all sitting down to our tea, how many high-profile Europe-focussed journalists are there in the UK? How much coverage of European politics is there, for that matter (even when the French President popped over for a visit, most coverage was focussed on his good-looking new missus rather than anything he said or did)? In particular, though, how much coverage is there of EU politics: the goings on in Brussels and Strasbourg at the Parliament, Council and Commission? Continue reading →

State-sanctioned mob justice, don’t you just love it?

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Pensioner, 83, notches up ASBO:

“Police said Mr Hughes, of Vane Lane, Coggeshall, Essex, had not been convicted of any child sex offence. But magistrates had decided to use civil anti-social behaviour laws after police received a number of complaints about him.”

Welcome to Britain in the 21st century. To be branded a paedophile, and to have both your name and the street on which you live broadcast across the newswires, all you need is for your neighbours not to like you very much. No kiddie-fiddling required – but torch-wielding lynchmobs almost guaranteed.

And here we all are complaining about the insanity of the Sudanese courts…

So, are the Tories going to have the guts to offer up a policy overturning the glorious summary “justice” of ASBOs and, you know, perhaps going back to the traditions of innocent until proven guilty and the rule of law that used to be taken for granted prior to the Blair years? We’ve had some promising rhetoric from Cameron on ID Cards (though not so much, that I’m aware of, on the database state) – what are they going to do about the other Labour-introduced injustices of modern Britain? Or are they doing too well in the polls to care any more?

The Sun – you what?

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The Sun's graphic

The graphic above appears on the Sun’s website today as part of their “Oi, Gordon – give us a referendum on the EU reform treaty or else” campaign.

That it’s full of distortions is unsurprising, but some of these key points appear to be outright lies.

I mean, I’ve read the old constitution, upon which the new treaty is heavily based, and am fairly well up on the contents of the new reform treaty. By my reckoning:

LIES: At no point is the EU given powers to oversee the UK economy. At no point is an EU army (Churchill’s idea, that…) founded. There is no mention of the EU gaining control of health and education. Britain has maintained its opt-out over human rights clauses, as well as over immigration and asylum. Oh, and – even if it may be very similar to the old constitution – it’s no longer a constitution.

DISTORTIONS: Under the terms of the new text, there will be no EU Foreign Minister (merely a powerless foreign affairs spokesman). Even the lost vetoes and diplomatic service thing are, in context, overblown and not as drastic as they are made out.

In other words, out of the ten attention-grabbing items listed in that graphic (the only part of the story most Sun readers are likely to bother reading), no fewer than nine are more or less nonsense.

Ah… Informed debate, eh? Dontcha just love it?

Oh, and please also note that in their report on their MORI poll on the EU treaty and proposed referendum, their figures are different between the pie charts and the text.

In the pie charts, 32% are for, 38% against – a significant six point difference. In the text, 44% are for, 46% against – within the margin of error.

And, as blogging poll expert Anthony Wells notes, those figures could also – rather than suggest, as the Sun does, that a referendum is both essential and going to provide an inevitable win for the “No” camp – show that the “Yes” camp has a far stronger chance of winning than anyone ever expected.

Shouting into the storm – and EU 2.0

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Guardian

Everyone in the UK knows that of the national daily papers, it’s really only the barely-read (and increasingly unreadable) Guardian (c.311,000 sales per issue) and Independent (c.190,000 sales per issue) who are in favour of the European Union.

The Times (c.595,000) and Sun (c.2,916,000) follow their owner Rupert Murdoch’s eurosceptic lead. The Telegraph (c.833,000) and Mail (c.2,205,000) play to the middle-England, vaguely xenophobic gallery. The People (c.667,000) is also instinctively anti-EU in most of its approaches, most of the time. The Express (c.735,000) does what the Mail does, only with less panache. If you count the similarly unthinking Star (c.667,000) and Sport (c.93,000) as newspapers, they’re also primarily anti-EU on the rare occasions they bother to mention it.

Then there’s the effectively EU-neutral Mirror (c.1,425,000) – which will run anti-EU pieces quite happily, but also take on pro-EU government propaganda just to be different to the Sun – and largely impartial Financial Times (c.130,000).

So, daily – according to those ABC figures – that makes 13,055,000 anti-EU newspaper sales and 1,555,000 EU-neutral sales, compared to just 501,000 pro-EU newspaper sales.
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Neil Clark of the Guardian is a fictional construct

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I mean, what other explanation can there be for this pile of wilfully-ignorant, almost precisely wrong in every way piece of abject dross?

“The most nauseating aspect of the campaign is the way we are repeatedly told that the Iraqi interpreters worked for ‘us’.
Who exactly is meant by ‘us’? In common with millions of other Britons, I did not want the Iraq war, an illegal invasion of a sovereign state engineered and egged on by a tiny minority of fanatical neoconservatives whose first loyalty was not to Britain but to the cause of Pax Americana.”

I gave up reading the Grauniad several months ago, so I didn’t realise it had turned into a satirical journal – that’s a pretty fine pastiche of the American pro-war right’s standard version of the supposed rabid idiocy of anti-war liberals. Because, I mean come on – no one could write that sort of rubbish with a straight face and genuinely mean it, could they?

But wait – it gets better!

“The interpreters did not work for ‘us’, the British people, but for themselves – they are paid around £16 a day, an excellent wage in Iraq – and for an illegal occupying force. Let’s not cast them as heroes. The true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country.”

Yes – you did read that right. Neil Clark just called the nutters detonating car bombs in crowded markets “heroes”.

*applause*

Go read it – it’s fantastic. It’s almost enough to make me want to begin to wholeheartedly support the war, donate all my savings to the Republican Party, plaster my flat with big posters of George W in flight gear, and to chemically castrate and set fire to every single liberal (whether with a small or a large “L” and in the modern and the classical senses, just to make sure) in an attempt to prevent the likes of Clark ever breeding and polluting our world with their gloriously idiotic views ever again.

In more sensible news, read Dan Hardie’s latest update on the campaign, and watch this, courtesy of the decidedly anti-war Tim Ireland (or, in Neil Clark world, Tim Rumsfeld):


See also Mr Eugenedes on the glorious Mr Clark, and if you can be bothered head over to the fiction suit’s testing ground, where the seams of self-righteousness come in for a bit of a battering, but swiftly re-assert their hold through sheer smug self-satisfaction in the knowledge that there’s not the remotest possibility of being wrong when you consider yourself the truest lefty in the world.

Oh, and note to the Guardian: if you want someone to churn out mindlessly ill-considered, utterly un-researched garbage to spew out to your hilariously bipolar online readership, both confirming the prejudices of the American right-wing trolls and acting as a fluffer to the dwindling enthusiasm of the nuttier reaches of the British left, then I offer good rates.

Neil Clark, I salute you – truly amazing levels of delusion, sir, and a wonderful contribution to neocon efforts to smear all lefties as nutters to boot…

Telling national differences

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In the UK, for the last couple of weeks it’s been all but impossible to avoid discussing the brain-dead actions of a small group of social outcasts locked in a garish TV studio that’s been converted into a televised zoo. You don’t need to have watched the thing to have an opinion, and mine has largely been to rivise my previous dislike of clusterbombing unarmed civilians

In Germany, meanwhile, they’ve been getting all excited about a dog who can balance a glass of water on its head. Again, there’s no need to see it to know that that’s bloody brilliant.

But as I’m so nice, I done gone tracked it down on You Tube for your delectation. Watch this, and tell me the world wouldn’t be a better place if Channel 4 was forced to replace Big Brother with rolling footage of abnormally trained animals.

Hideous screeching harpies launching entirely unjustified attacks on their betters, or dogs with low-key party tricks? No contest, is there? Germany here I come – to take the talented mutt across the border and buy that pooch a pint.

Three years on

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Via Garry (via Robert Sharp, who I really must add to the blogroll), an interesting piece on media coverage of the Iraq conflict which reminded me of one I wrote back on 25th March 2003 for another site. It was basically a review of the TV coverage, and as I can’t find a link to the article as published then, I’ll reproduce it in full here – and unedited from its initial form of three years ago. It’s interesting to see how much (or little) has changed in the coverage:

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Even if you are not sickened by the so-called justification for the conflict itself, and pride yourself on your John Wayne Gung-ho warmongering/patriotism, surely the television coverage of this particularly unpleasant exercise in aggression is enough to make you vomit?

In the last few days, we have been subjected to live coverage of the intensive bombing of a heavily-populated city, on the spot footage of Iraqi troops shooting at a downed airman, witnessed American Marines cheering as they blow up a building full of Republican Guard soldiers, and anchormen desperately acting like they aren�t quite pleased at the scoop that one of their longest serving reporters has been killed. Then yesterday it was revealed that the mother of one of the captured Americans only knew of her son�s misfortune when his face was flashed up on TV � sure enough, news crews were round her gaff like lightning to film the tears streaming down her face. Every time the B-52s take off, the networks know that in six hours time there are going to be some really cool explosions across the Iraqi capital, and so have plenty of warning to free up some airtime to watching the fireworks later in the day. It all makes great television.

According to the BBC, in the first five days of the conflict their viewing figures for news coverage peaked at 32 million � more than half the UK�s population. In addition, there has been a 75% increase in take-up for digital and satellite receivers by ghoulish but previously technophobic members of the public. War means money, never so much as for television companies in this age of 24 hour scrolling news. The presenters are looking decidedly knackered as we approach the second week of the war. Normally they have precious little to do, and can just slot in the same report over and over again throughout the day. With war, the situation alters by the minute, and these poor little newshounds desperately have to keep up. Considering how much stick many of the news channels have got over the last few years (especially BBC News24), it is vital to their continued existence that they pull this off well.

Then there�s the massive hypocrisy of all the news networks broadcasting footage of Iraqi prisoners, while holding back on showing any footage of captured American servicemen and women that the Iraqis have released. As the Pentagon has expressed, the Iraqis filming and publicising the faces of their American prisoners as a propaganda tool breaks the Geneva Convention. The question that has to be asked is does the Geneva Convention not apply to Iraqi prisoners? There seems to be no acknowledgement of this fact from any of the Western news channels � not even the BBC, from whom I personally would expect a little more restraint. As it stands, every news show that showed the footage of Iraqi prisoners with their faces showing has broken the Geneva Convention just as much as the Iraqis have by filming their American hostages.

With every broadcast from Baghdad, Western reporters keep insisting that the have �no way to verify� any of the Iraqi claims of prisoners, civilian casualties, or the good health of their leader. They keep stressing that their reports are being vetted by the Iraqi intelligence services before they leave the country, and that their freedom of speech is compromised. Yet not once have there been any complaints that the British and American military have also suppressed information. The closest the networks have come is to mention the �news blackout� during the first few hours of operations, yet with no complaint.

In the last Gulf War, General Schwarzkopf had the cheek to publicly thank the Western news networks for broadcasting a lot of his bluffs, ensuring that Saddam and his advisors had little idea of what was actually going on. This time it�s even more extreme, from the maps purporting to show the locations of chemical weapons factories that the UN inspectors somehow failed to locate to the constant drive to scoop the opposition by reporting unsubstantiated �facts� from unreliable sources on the off-chance that there�s some truth to them.

The occupation of Basra has, as a rough estimate, been announced five times over the last six days, despite the fact that coalition troops have yet to enter the city. On the first day of the conflict, a respected BBC journalist managed somehow to keep a straight face while claiming that the incredibly detailed troop movements he was relaying (which later turned out to be untrue) had come to him from a reliable civilian source, and that the military command did not want those �facts� to be known. Sky News reported that Saddam was believed dead, and that the video footage of him was in fact a body double, until the CIA announced that voice identification technology had verified the man as Hussein. Most networks announced the grenade attack on the coalition base in Kuwait as a �terrorist� attack, bolstering the American and British claims that Saddam has links to terrorist organisations, despite the fact the actual perpetrator turned out to be an American serviceman. All networks also reported the surrender of �8,000 Republican Guards�, with no official retractions coming at any point, even when the same channels later announced that there were only 3,000 prisoners of war to date.

It is surely entirely reasonable for both sides in this conflict to want to control the information/propaganda that is coming out � the Iraqis more than anyone. After all, they have British, American and Australian journalists deep in the heart of their country, scrutinising every action, and reporting back to the outside world. This fact in itself is amazing. Are there any Iraqi journalists being allowed to report from the coalition high command in Kuwait? Are there any Iraqi journalists �embedded� with coalition forces? Of course not � that would risk a major breach of security. It�s a major breach of security having journalists of any nationality along for the ride, but at least if they�re with you, you can control what they say.

Unlike the coalition forces, the Iraqi regime, for all its faults, has been cooperating pretty much as fully as it realistically can with the Western Media. When ITN�s Terry Lloyd went missing (apparently killed by American troops, as it turns out), the Iraqis were cooperating as much as the British and Americans in attempts to locate him. It is not in Iraq�s interest to deliberately kill any journalists � at least, not at this stage. To demonise Iraq in the manner of the Murdoch press, it is entirely possible that the reason they have agreed to let journalists from the countries that are attacking them remain in Baghdad is so that they have a ready supply of hostages and human shields to use should the war start going badly. But let�s face it, they�ll probably use the chemical and biological weapons that Britain and America keep on insisting they possess (with no evidence whatsoever) before they get to that stage, at which point the journalists will be pouring out of the country like rats.

As this war wears on and on, its instigators have, in the twenty-first century media, a propaganda tool of immense power and unprecedented reach. They are trying to utilise it to its fullest capacity, spreading images of surrendering Iraqis to encourage more to do the same, emphasising the amount of humanitarian aid waiting out in the Gulf to be delivered, putting out false reports of troop movements and military strategy, bluff after bluff after bluff, wild claim after wild claim. We were told to expect a short war, now to expect a long one. We were told Saddam is dead, now he�s alive.

As it stands at the moment, it seems safest not to believe anything the networks tell us. All information regarding the conflict is classified, no matter what may appear to be the case, and no military commander would be stupid enough to tell Fox News of his plans until long after they have been successfully put into operation. The news reports are simply acting as a slightly more sophisticated version of �Germany Calling� crossed with every lowbrow reality TV show of the last five years. �War, what is it good for?� � wild speculation, propaganda, misinformation and excruciating excuses for painful entertainment.