Time Magazine and Soft Censorship

On the iconic day in the Iraq War when the Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down in Baghdad (with the help of U.S. Marines), CNN showed the video footage over and over again, seemingly providing semiotic proof of the fact the administration was right in their assessment that the Iraqis wanted U.S. forces to overthrow their long dictator. However, CNN World juxtaposed those images with the costs of war – showing video of civilian casualties and dead bodies. While the U.S. coverage whitewashed the war in general until Abu Ghraib (See MIT and Video), the rest of the world saw a more realistic and contested perspective of what was happening on the ground and the fact at least 117,000 (and probably closer to 250k Iraqi civilians were killed). This is not an isolated situation, with “objective” and uncritical coverage increasingly the norm on all channels except MSNBC (from the left) and Fox (from the right). And magazines are often complicit in this “soft censorship” where framing, emphasis and flak are all used to undermine a truly critical perspective on the news that matters.

                                                                                 

Here we see a great analysis from Daily Kos on Time Magazine’s complicity in this long standing problem with the fourth estate, in this case using the diversionary strategy to perfection …