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WMD Weapons of Mass Deception | |||
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| "Rips
the American media for its timidity, guilelessness and rampant pro-war
bias." There
were two wars going on in Iraq - one was fought with armies of soldiers,
bombs and a fearsome military force. The other was fought alongside it
with cameras, satellites, armies of journalists and propaganda techniques.
One war was rationalized as an effort to find and disarm WMDs - Weapons
of Mass Destruction; the other was carried out by even more powerful WMDs,
Weapons of Mass Deception. The
TV networks in America considered their non-stop coverage their finest
hour, pointing to the use of embedded journalists and new technologies
that permitted viewers to see a war up close for the first time. But different
countries saw different wars. Why? For those of us watching the coverage, war was more of a spectacle, an around the clock global media marathon, pitting media outlets against each other in ways that distorted truth and raised as many questions about the methods of TV news, as it did the armed intervention it was covering-and it some cases-promoting.
A Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University, and radio news director turned CNN and Emmy Award winning ABC News Producer, Schechter wears several hats at the same time. He is now an award-winning independent investigative journalist and filmmaker as well as an outspoken author. Danny Schechter is not afraid to take on his own industry. WMD busts through so-called "objective reporting" to challenge media complicity with the government and its cooperation in presenting the Iraq War the way it did. This is a hard-hitting, yet personal film that looks at the television war and asks why the American audience lapped it up and how the Pentagon helped shape media coverage. |
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