On Sunday I was watching coverage of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan and cringed as the broadcasters wholeheartedly adopted the military lingo about ‘surgical strikes’ and ‘precision’ bombings. But as MSNBC reports, even if these bombs and missile were that accurate (and we know from the Gulf War post-mortems that they are not), inevitably civilians will die from this precision bombing.
In this case, the U.S. managed to kill several United Nations aid workers in an incident eerily similar to the bombing of the Chinese embassy during the Kosovo war. Apparently the building the UN aid workers were staying at had been used as a radio station in the early 1990s, but was no longer being used in that capacity.
Besides which, I still don’t understand the U.S. rationalization that a radio or television station is a legitimate military target. If so, are newspapers and printing presses also legitimate targets?
As for the American media, I had to laugh at the current obsession CNN and other news outlets seem to have with the Arab satellite news channel, Al-Jazira (anyone out there have any idea on the correct spelling)? Most of the coverage seems to be geared toward portraying the news channel as biased against the United States.
But it’s hard to take accusations of bias seriously from networks who run graphics of waving American flags and red, white and blue ribbons along the bottom of the screen during their broadcasts.