So, I live in Washington D.C. - well, not actually in the District, but inside the Beltway - which means that all the various protests people mount are local news.
I'm of a couple minds about last weekend's event. First off, the anti-war folks are right. We shouldn't be in Iraq. Our soldiers are getting killed for no good reason. They aren't defending us by being in Iraq. They aren't advancing our national interest. The administration wanted a war, lied through their teeth - and this was obvious at the time - to get one, and now people are dying for those lies. I don't know if pulling the troops out of there now is a better idea than not, but I'm 100% certain they should never have been sent there in the first place.
Now, there are elements in the anti-war movement that I dislike greatly. The flag burners, the remnant Marxists, the people who slander our soldiers. There are bad people who are soldiers - hell, one of them is currently the Commander-in-Chief - but the vast majority of our soldiers are good people doing a tough job that requires more courage on a daily basis than most Americans ever have to stump up. We need our soldiers, and they sacrifice a lot for us.
So I am rock-solid in support of our troops. That is, in fact, precisely why I am against this war. Because it's killing the men and women who are defending our country, and achieving precisely the opposite. Our invasion of Iraq has made we civilians less safe and made our soldiers much, much less safe. It's a stupid, useless war.
Oh, and to those who try and conflate "the war" and "the troops" - fuck you. Don't be obtuse.
Anyway. That's where I stand. So when some media talking head mentioned the protest this weekend, I'd invariably think "yeah, that's right, those Republican assholes getting our boys killed", and then roll my eyes and grimace when some idiot was shown with a burning American flag. Those people tick me off.
Oh, and as a sidebar: if you or anyone else calls them "typical" of liberals, then I get to call Dennis Rader a typical conservative Christian. I mean, hell, Pat Robertson issued a call to murder. And he represents a lot more conservatives than these flag-burning idiots represent liberals.
But what really ticked me off this weekend was the stupefyingly biased media coverage. Leavened with idiots or not, the anti-war people pulled 100,000 attendees. There was a vast crowd of them.
There was also a tiny, tiny, miniscule crowd of perhaps 400 Bush cultists. They had hoped for a few thousand, but only four hundred turned out.
Guess who got the most airtime?
I was listening to NPR news, of all things, and they led with 'there is a counter-demonstration in Washington today'. They only mentioned those 100,000 people in reference to the counter-demonstration. Guess who got a direct radio quote? That's right, one of the counter-demonstrators. No quotes at all from the protesters. This was on NPR.
Television was worse. Local news offered a few shots of teeming crowds, a picture of some idiot burning an American flag, and then they spent eighty percent of their time on the counter-demonstrators. Lots of interviews there. Two-to-one as compared to protester interviews. CNN was the same.
The conservative control of this country's media is jaw-dropping.
There were a hundred thousand people there. That's two hundred and fifty times the number of reactionaries who showed up. Thus, if media were "fair", the anti-war demonstrators should get two hundred and fifty times the media coverage. For every two minute blurb by the counter-demonstrators, there ought to have been five hundred minutes for the protestors.
It wasn't even fifty-fifty, a division which itself would have been bullshit.
A hundred thousand people. I bet they made a fair amount of noise. You'd think it would be more than the four hundred there to heckle them. But the four hundred got an awfully big microphone. Awfully big. National.
Free of charge.
That's how propaganda works. And that's why we're in Iraq in the first place.
- Sun Ra