This whole debacle about US troops abusing prisoners of war in Iraq is getting rapidly out of hand. The Americans don't seem to think there's anything wrong with it, while the Arab world have declared renewed hatred of the US because of it. Whilst a lot of papers in the rest of the world ran the abuse and torture pictures as their front page and lead stories, in USA Today, it wasn't even mentioned. In other newspapers, it was buried inside.
In a classicly blinkered move that we've come to expect of well-educated people, David D. Perlmutter, a historian of war and media at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said the decision showed that U.S. editors understood what kind of war coverage interested U.S. readers. This is what he actually said (and the horrible thing is, I expect he truly believes what he's saying) :
“The torture pictures are absolutely irrelevant. Americans care about American soldiers, and only journalistic and political and academic elites fret about pictures of collateral damage. If you start talking to the public, you’ll find people sympathizing with the soldiers.”
I don't know who this idiot is, but I think we can clearly discover three things from his statement:
[1] He is demonstrably clinically insane.
[2] He has no idea what is going on in the world. He considers collateral damage to be something "academic elites fret about".
I'm sure the parents and families of the allied soldiers Mr Perlmutter's fellow countrymen and elite troops continue to slaughter would find cause to disagree. After all, killing people on your own side is collateral damage, isn't it?
[3] Perlmutter doesn't know what the general public are thinking.
In a classicly blinkered move that we've come to expect of well-educated people, David D. Perlmutter, a historian of war and media at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said the decision showed that U.S. editors understood what kind of war coverage interested U.S. readers. This is what he actually said (and the horrible thing is, I expect he truly believes what he's saying) :
“The torture pictures are absolutely irrelevant. Americans care about American soldiers, and only journalistic and political and academic elites fret about pictures of collateral damage. If you start talking to the public, you’ll find people sympathizing with the soldiers.”
I don't know who this idiot is, but I think we can clearly discover three things from his statement:
[1] He is demonstrably clinically insane.
[2] He has no idea what is going on in the world. He considers collateral damage to be something "academic elites fret about".
I'm sure the parents and families of the allied soldiers Mr Perlmutter's fellow countrymen and elite troops continue to slaughter would find cause to disagree. After all, killing people on your own side is collateral damage, isn't it?
[3] Perlmutter doesn't know what the general public are thinking.
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