Saturday, July 15, 2006

Bloglines - Media coverage on the assault on Lebanon

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Left I on the News
A leftwing view of the day's news and the way it's presented in the media

Media coverage on the assault on Lebanon

By Eli

Continuing my theme from yesterday, Eric Boehlert at Huffington Post (yes, believe it or not, there finally is one post there on the subject) quantifies CNN's coverage of the deaths that occured yesterday. He found twelve references to the lone Israeli civilian casualty to a single mention of the 52 Lebanese civilian casualties.

For my part, let me note this. Typified by this AP story, press coverage that I have seen universally mentions the "50 Katyusha rockets" (sometimes listed as 75 or 100) that Hizballah has fired at Israel, but not one has quantified the number of Israeli strikes. Of course they mention the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, but any idea that those strikes have been manyfold greater in number, not to mention probably an order of magnitude or two greater in tonnage, is completely absent.

73 Lebanese, "almost all civilians" according to AP, have now been killed. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice describes this in this way: "I think they understand the need to exercise restraint." Evidentally not showing restraint to Condi would involve the use of nuclear weapons; anything else is "exercising restraint," violations of international law and common decency notwithstanding.



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