What I take to be a breaking story is the U.S. paying for story placements in the Iraqi media. Now I have only glimpsed at the CSM version, so the unanswered questions I have are "what stories did they plant?" and "Were the stories true?". My first take is: what is the big deal? There seems to be this attack that this goes against Democratic principles, but how? I see no evidence that their press is not free to publish what they want - they just decided to take a bribe. That might not be very democratic, but at least it is capitalisic. If the United States or their agents had a gun to these publishers's heads, then we should all be crying foul, but from these reports, it sounds like they chose to publish these stories from biased sources. I do not know the state of the media in Iraq, but most media sources are money making corporations. These media corporations all tend to have their bias - some people may reject stories from Fox News because of that, others the Village Voice. If Iraqi citizens are going to reject stories from these news organizations because they took a few dollars to publish these stories, that is their right. If other news outlets were taking pay to publish stories from terrorists, then I hope their would a campaign to boycott them.
Posted by shs4 at December 1, 2005 04:01 PM | TrackBackI think the U.S. was paying for the Iraqi papers to run old Family Circus comments where the kids would do something and the "Not Me" ghost would run away.
Posted by: maggette at December 8, 2005 03:36 AM