Wednesday, February 16, 2005

World Tribunal on Iraq: Media Held Guilty of Deception: "A peoples tribunal has held much of Western media guilty of inciting violence and deceiving people in its reporting of Iraq."

"The informal panel of WTI judges accused the United States and the British governments of impeding journalists in performing their task, and intentionally producing lies and misinformation. The panel accused western corporate media of filtering and suppressing information, and of marginalising and endangering independent journalists. More journalists were killed in a 14-month period in Iraq than in the entire Vietnam war."

""This is not simply an exercise to denounce the mainstream media for their bias and incompetence," said Dr. Tony Alessandrini, a human rights activist who has published several articles on the U.S. colonisation of Iraq. "These denunciations have been going on for months. Here in Rome, we must go further.." Alessandrini, who helped organised the WTI added, "What we are being asked to consider is not simply media bias, but rather the active complicity of media in crimes that have been committed and are being committed on a daily basis against the people in Iraq.""

""This is about condemning journalistic complicity of war crimes," said Dr. Miller, who is also co-editor of Spinwatch, a group that monitors public relations and propaganda. Miller said the Pentagon "does not recognise the concept of independent journalists, because they are providers of unfriendly information", and that mainstream media in the United States and in Britain was "complicit in furthering the selling of the invasion, and ongoing occupation. All studies conducted on mainstream media show dominance by government policies, and wartime coverage of TV news in the UK was generally sympathetic to the government's case.." "

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