The Media as a Security Threat to America

[kpete]

Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Media as a Security Threat to America
Posted by Juan Cole at 10:15am, September 9, 2010.

Call it strange or call it symptomatic. These last weeks, Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has been on a “media blitz.” He’s been giving out interviews as if they were party favors. Yet, as far as I can tell, not a single interviewer has asked him anything like: “General Petraeus, twenty percent of Pakistan, which supposedly harbors Osama bin Laden and various militant groups involved in the Afghan War, and whose intelligence agency reportedly has an ongoing stake in the Afghan Taliban, is now underwater. Roads, bridges, railway lines, and so U.S. supply lines have been swept away. How do you expect this cataclysm to affect the Afghan War in the short and long term?”

In these last weeks, the Afghan War has once again been front-page news. Yet only a single reporter -- the heroic Carlotta Gall of the New York Times -- has thought to focus on the subject of how the Biblical-style floods in Pakistan might affect the U.S. war effort and the overstretched supply lines that play a major role in supporting U.S. troops there. While you could learn about rising violence in Afghanistan, the perilous state of the Kabul Bank, and many other subjects, reporting on the floods and the war has been nil, with even speculative pieces on the subject largely nonexistent.

We know next to nothing about how U.S. supplies are now getting to Afghanistan, or how much the cost of getting them there has risen, or how this might affect U.S. operations in that country. Given the scale of the catastrophe and the degree to which the U.S. is embedded in the region, you might at least expect the American media to be flooded with commentary on what the event could mean for us. Think again. .....

more:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175292/tomgram%3A_juan_cole%2C_the_media_as_a_security_threat_to_america__/#more

[mmonk]

1. Today, the media is an arm of the government.

[molly77]

2. Got that right

Local , state and national. Newspapers are going under, not because of the internet, but because they are boring. WE cannot abide boring.

Same goes for the film and publishing industry. Hollywood can't seem to understand that everybody does not enjoy action/violence..and that solving a murder case is not the only plot WE are going to pay money to see.

As for publishing, it seems that teaching at the university level and a few short stories published will mean someone will read your manuscript. My memories of higher education is that interesting professors were the exception.One point of view for most of the books published is also boring.When is the last time that someone like Mark Twain had a best seller today in the US?