MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

Now I’m going to vomit.

• Posted by Beth on May 19th, 2005 filed in General, Journalism, Politics, The War    

You thought I was pissed off in the last post, didn’t you?

Get a big fat load of THIS!

ANOTHER MEDIA EXECUTIVE SMEARS THE U.S. MILITARY

Eason Jordan has an imitator. Her name is Linda Foley, and she is the International President of the Newspaper Guild. According to this site, she is also president of Communications Workers of America, the nation’s largest broadcast and journalism workers union. Foley is, therefore, a big deal. The words she says in public matter. Last Friday, speaking at the 2005 National Conference for Media Reform (you’ll note the irony in that in a moment) in St. Louis, she made the following outrageous claim:

“Journalists, by the way, are not just being targeted verbally or …ah, or… ah, politically. They are also being targeted for real, um…in places like Iraq. What outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there’s not more outrage about the number, and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq.”

“They target and kill journalists…uh, from other countries, particularly Arab countries like Al -, like Arab news services like Al-Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios with impunity…”

Of course, Foley offered absolutely no evidence during her recorded remarks, which I watched on my local news station tonight during Mark Hyman’s syndicated The Point segment.

Read all of it.

It’s late, and I’m going to sleep. You KNOW I’ll have something to say about this later.

Then there’s this:
Media Unions Join Worldwide Call of Journalists for Investigation into Media Staff Deaths in Iraq

Washington, D.C.–In letters today to President Bush, The Newspaper Guild-CWA and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists called on the administration to “heed the requests from journalists around the world for an independent investigation into the record number of deaths among media staff covering the war in Iraq.”

President Linda Foley of TNG-CWA and Thomas R Carpenter, AFTRA National Director of News and Broadcast, sent the letters as part of the International Federation of Journalists’ global campaign to keep a public focus on the dangerous conditions facing journalists and media staff covering the war in Iraq. Today is the second anniversary of the attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad by U.S. forces, in which two journalists covering the war were killed.

“We recognize, of course, that most journalists who die each year are killed by cruel extremists…and we unequivocally condemn those attacks and the people behind them,” Foley wrote.

But the United States also must defend its “traditions of liberty and justice by addressing the concerns of journalists around the world,” she added. The Pentagon’s report about the Palestine Hotel tragedy, to date, has been inadequate and unconvincing, raising more questions than it resolved, her letter continued.

Hey, DUMBASS–People DO get killed in warzones! Does it REALLY require an investigation to figure that out? WTF! Guess who carried THAT story?

UPDATE 2: The more I look at this, I see that Ms. Foley is an avowed leftist with an axe to grind. For her it’s apparently all about the Pentagon being the bad guys (duh) who aren’t doing anything to protect journalists. She’s been wrapped up in efforts demanding investigations by the Pentagon for quite some time, so this latest thing isn’t surprising. She’s quite careful to not (publicly) accuse the military of targeting journalists outright, but she very CLEARLY implies it. I don’t think this is Eason Jordan level scandal; I think it IS indicative of the kind of crap that gets to the public, though. She doesn’t have any sort of editorial control–she’s the head of a union. Yes, she can and does pass on her agenda to others, but it’s not the same as editorial control. I am sickened and outraged by her obvious agenda and I’ll never excuse it, but…I don’t know. I don’t think this is worthy of Eason Jordan/Dan Rather attention at all. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not going to sound any alarms yet.