Old Media has huge budgets from which they leverage to cover news in regions of the world where New media has no access.
So we get spoon fed news that sometimes isn’t relevant and is worth a pile of horse dodooh. Here’s one supreme example.
Iraq.
I really don’t have much of an opinion on how the media has tackled Iraq. I want more coverage, better coverage. I want video. I want interviews. I want reality. Instead I have to listen to the crap that the Old Media wants me to hear. Here’s what I know.
Iraq isn’t as important as we think. We lost the war. We are getting ready to piss of Iran. But even that isn’t important. Getting ourselves weaned of the nipple of crude oil would really go a long way to stopping the bloodshed. But the American people don’t really want that do we? We need our cheap gas. And so do our corporations and the stockholders. So let’s forget about it. Let the blood flow read down the streets until it begins to spill into the gutters of America.
Let’s talk about another conflict that is far more important, far more bloody. And even more misreported.
Democratic Republic of Congo
When was the last time you heard about this war on your nightly news?
The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is deemed by many as the Third World War, and the biggest war since WW2. Already the death toll is the largest since World War 2 for any conflict. Yet we have no media coverage. No US Intervention. No global outcry from mainstream media.
Old Media holds us hostage because I can’t afford to send people to cover this conflict. This war has largely been fought by Innocent Children.
A brutal civil war has been raging in The Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996. No fewer than seven African countries have been involved since it started. So far, 3.8 million people – men, women and children – have died as a result of the bloody conflict either as a direct result of fighting or because of disease and famine.
This is a war that continues to claim thousands of lives every month. It is a war about territory, ethnicity and resources, with its roots in, but not limited to, the genocide in Rwanda in 1995. It is a war that frequently descends to inhuman levels, the likes of which are uneasy reminders of the atrocities seen in Rwanda, and also in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
‘Armed militia groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo kidnapped hundreds of rival tribe members, tortured, mutilated, raped and decapitated their victims, and even boiled alive and ate two girls in front of their mother.’
While I don’t recommend jumping into the DRC and beginning coverage of this war. I believe we need to ask some of the mainstream big media outlets why they aren’t covering this story. And what can be done to stop this. And why are bombing Somalia in the name of terror when the true African terror has ascended on the Congo.
Source: War Child Music
Originally posted on January 15, 2007 @ 12:45 am
You want tragedy, try Zimbabwe, you never hear a thing in the media about what’s going on there. Unfortunately the case now is that thanks to Iraq, the days of the US being the worlds policeman are over, who ever you want to blame for that.
Likewise another tragedy left without a voice in the media. Ugh.
The Congo Free State was a kingdom owned personally by Leopold the II of Belgium that included all of what we know now as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
By skillful diplomacy and deceit, Leopold won the co-operation of the major powers of Europe, and in 1885 seized 905,000 square miles of territory that became the Congo “Free” State, owned wholly by Leopold himself.
He introduced the concept of terres vacantes, which meant that any land not occupied by European settlers was deemed to belong to the state.
The savage Leopold resorted to ordering the assassinations of recalcitrant chiefs, and sent in the Force Publique to terrorize the native population.
The officers were white minions of the state, and many of the black soldiers were cannibals. They burned villages and cut off human hands as trophies under orders of the white officers, who required them to show one hand for every bullet used.
This practice became so commonplace that these severed hands actually became a kind of currency.
During the 20-year period of Leopold’s brutal reign of terror, the native population of the Congo “Free” State was reduced by half.
Source:
Wikipedia article on the Congo Free State.