Mainstream Media Mind Control

I spent five hours yesterday in the Houston airport. For awhile, I sat watching CNN on an overhead screen, and noticed something in the way they report on the war. It's subtle, but doubtlessly affects the way you see the war.

They were reporting on the President's announcement that troops may get to start coming home early - after twelve months instead of the current fifteen. Good news, right? But the "b-roll," or background footage they threw up while telling the story was of soldiers engaged in heavy house-to-house combat. It looked to be old footage from Al-anbar province, and might have been as much as two years old.

I found myself wondering, Why would they use this footage? Were they just looking for something exciting to show? Lately in Iraq, there isn't much heavy fighting being done by OUR troops - the Iraqi army has taken much of that burden from us.

I don't know why CNN chose that footage - but I'm sure that it had a subtle effect on its audience - to make Iraq look more like war than reconstruction. And people are much more likely to oppose a war than a work of rebuilding, which is really what's happening now in Iraq.

On the same note, the only other mention of the war on yesterday's airport news broadcast was that three soldiers died in an IED attack. That's certainly a tragedy, but I wonder why they chose not to report on the large weapons cache found yesterday in Jurf A' Sukhr, the great job our Provincial Reconstruction Teams are doing distributing food or the capture yesterday of one of AQI's highest value weapons traffickers, known as the "Prince of Princes."

What CNN isn't giving you is CONTEXT. They'll show you bodies all day long, but without any sense of the astounding progress for which those brave volunteers are dying. The upshot? It gives the sense that they're dying for nothing. And that is not only a tragedy, it's a travesty.

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