Raw Story reports:
The United States edition of the October 2, 2006 issue of Newsweek features a radically different cover story from its International counterparts, RAW STORY has learned.
The cover of International editions, aimed at Europe, Asia, and Latin America, displays in large letters the title “LOSING AFGHANISTAN,” along with an arresting photograph of an armed jihadi.
The cover of the United States edition, in contrast, is dedicated to celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz and is demurely captioned “My Life in Pictures.”
I have nothing against Annie Leibovitz. She is a fantastic photographer and I really enjoy her work. I’d be very interested to read a profile about her life and experiences taking photos of important and famous people. But, where in the fuck does Newsweek get off downplaying to the American people the vital and depressing news from Afghanistan, while it puts it front and center for their international audience? This is election season. The country has been at war in Afghanistan for almost six years and at war in Iraq for almost four. Things are not going well and we deserve to know that. The Bush administration is trying to paint the GOP in Congress as the better party to protect our national security. They never give an honest appraisal of the situation abroad, preferring to tell us about last throes, purple fingers, and captured terrorists. Newsweek just enables them to deceive the public by reducing the profile of their reporting on the “Global War on Terror”.
It’s a disgrace. The American people deserve the truth. We went through this before in Vietnam, where the government was allowed for too long to paint a rosy picture of progress, while the media soft-pedaled the bad news there. We lost 58,000 people in Indochina. It didn’t have to be that way. Newsweek should consider this history and put the hard facts front and center in front of their domestic audience. Only we can choose our government. International audiences have no right to be better informed than we are.
and we can rest comfortably, knowing that things are going swimmingly in Iraq, and the violence is just a comma in the arc of history…I’m sure these people are enjoying their flowers and chocolates in the Anbar province.
Not much has changed, has it?
Not another case of “we didn’t want to influence the upcoming elections”…
Cuz, you know, gawd forbid people should be informed enough to vote the idiots who got us into this mess out of office or anything.
I am so sick of this crap.
What could be more apropos in highlighting the differences in what the media conglomerates believe the American public deserves to know as opposed to real reporting for the rest of the world….one a news story about what is happening in Afghanistan or the ‘harships’ that Leibovitch encountered while photographing Cruise and company?
If it wasn’t so pitiful and insulting it would almost be laughable-ok scratch that it’s not laughable at all, just downright scary the lows our propaganda media has sunk to. The Ellsberg papers would never have been published in this sellout climate.
The situation with the news media once allowed voters to form an objective vision of what was happening, but no more. We don’t know now whether what we hear in the media is exaggerated, minimized, truth or falsehood.
Since the media is no longer a good barometer of the country’s situation and direction, I am strongly beginning to believe that voters just have to vote their gut feeling now, regardless of news reports. The way it should now work is you vote for incumbents to keep the situation the same, but you vote them out if you want a new direction based on your gut feelings about the direction of the country. I truly believe that is all we have to go on with today’s propaganda filled, controlled news media. Hopefully the elections are fair anyway!