I thank all of you who have been so supportive recently. I have never before received so much positive feedback, and it was very heart-warming to know that so many people out there care. Having said that, it breaks my heart to say that this will be my last post on this blog. I wish I could just stop there, but I can not. The following also needs to be said:

For the record, I am officially a supporter of the administration and of her policies. I am a proponent for the war against terror and I believe in the mission in Iraq. I understand my role in that mission, and I accept it. I understand that I signed the contract which makes stop loss legal, and I retract any statements I made in the past that contradict this one. Furthermore, I have the utmost confidence in the leadership of my chain of command, including (but not limited to) the president George Bush and the honorable secretary of defense Rumsfeld. If I have ever written anything on this site or on others that lead the reader to believe otherwise, please consider this a full and complete retraction.

I apologize for any misunderstandings that might understandably arise from this. Should you continue to have questions, please feel free to contact me through e-mail. I promise to respond personally to each, but it may take some time; my internet access has become restricted.

posted by Daniel at Saturday, October 22, 2005

NBC photojournalist Tony Zumbado looked visibly shaken this afternoon when he spoke on MSNBC with Alison Stewart. It’s no wonder. He had just filmed the chaos at the New Orleans convention center where hundreds of people had been, by his account, dumped and abandoned over the past four days.

[snip]

He went on to describe some of the scenes he had witnessed: “The sanitation was unbelievable. The stench in there … was unbelievable. Dead people around the walls of the convention center, laying in the middle of the street in their dying chairs where they died, right there on their lawn chair. They were just covered up in their wheelchair, covered up, laying there for dead. Babies, two babies dehydrated and died. I’m telling you, I couldn’t take it.”

Then followed an exchange — not included in the transcript of the interview on MSNBC’s Web site — well worth noting. Stewart mentioned that many of the images Zumbado had shot of the dead and dying “couldn’t” be run on the air. Zumbado added that there was much more footage that he could have shot but did not, precisely because he knew it would never make it on the air.

It was clear that the footage we did see was whatever material had made it through the network’s own filter of self-censorship. As horrifying as the images shown were, they didn’t come close to Zumbado’s own stunned and graphic descriptions of what he had seen.

I wonder, what does it take to get that rating? Not much, apparently — especially since this site advocates no violence, and only speaks of it in terms of violent crime and violent wars, really has not addressed anything about racism, except for its pernicious persistence in our society, and has expressed hate only for hate.

Category 22 - Games

Sites that provide information and support game playing or downloading, video games, computer games, electronic games, tips, and advice on games or how to obtain cheat codes. Also includes sites dedicated to selling board games as well as journals and magazines dedicated to game playing. Includes sites that support or host online sweepstakes and giveaways.

“I wondered why you didn’t mention one of the biggest differences between the three DVD-by-mail services: censorship. Blockbuster and Wal-Mart refuse to stock and ship movies that are unrated or rated NC-17. ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien,’ for example, is available to their customers only in a sliced-and-diced version. Thank goodness for Netflix, which has the corporate courage to let people make up their own minds about what is appropriate for them to see and hear!”

Worse, readers complain that Blockbuster does not identify the movies that it has edited; you don’t discover the switcheroo until it’s too late.

Warning

Bumpers, I just had to do something I’ve never done before in the one year history of this blog. I deleted a reader’s comment, for their protection and mine. There was nothing wrong with it, it was literate and I basically agreed with it. But these days it pays to be very careful about mentioning Federal executive offices and the people who hold those offices in a way that could be construed to be communicating a threat. Bloggers have gotten visits from the FBI, Secret Service agents have been rounding up school kids. The reader didn’t really “communicate a threat” but the law is being read so broadly these days that “an abundance of caution” should be exercised.

What makes the “Ryan” case both chilling and a harbinger of what’s to come is that it isn’t about Janet Jackson and sex but about the presentation of war at a time when we are fighting one. That some of the companies whose stations refused to broadcast “Saving Private Ryan” also own major American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta leaves you wondering what other kind of self-censorship will be practiced next. If these media outlets are afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of a 60-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might fine them, toy with their licenses or deny them permission to expand their empires, might they defensively soften their news divisions’ efforts to present the graphic truth of an ongoing war? The pressure groups that are exercised by Bono and “Saving Private Ryan” are often the same ones who are campaigning to derail any news organization that’s not towing the administration line in lockstep with Fox.

Even without being threatened, American news media at first sanitized the current war, whether through carelessness or jingoism, proving too credulous about everything from weapons of mass destruction to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished.” During the early weeks of the invasion, carnage of any kind was kept off TV screens, as if war could be cost-free. Once the press did get its act together and exercised skepticism, it came under siege. News organizations that report facts challenging the administration’s version of events risk being called traitors. As with “Saving Private Ryan,” the aim of the news censors is to bleach out any ugliness or violence. But because the war in Iraq, unlike World War II, is increasingly unpopular and doesn’t have an assured triumphant ending, it must also be scrubbed of any bad news that might undermine its support among the administration’s base. Thus the censors argue that Abu Ghraib, and now a marine’s shooting of a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a Falluja mosque, are vastly “overplayed” by the so-called elite media.

[snip]

In this diet of “news” championed by the right, there’s no need for actual reporters who gather facts firsthand by leaving their laptops and broadcast booths behind and risking their lives to bear witness to what is actually happening on the ground in places like Falluja and Baghdad. The facts of current events can become as ideologically fungible as the scientific evidence supporting evolution. Whatever comforting version of events supports your politics is the “news.”

“The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.”

–George Orwell, 1984