Well, yes or no. As with many things in life, there are honest (at least try to be honest) western media outlets, such as NPR and PBS; and there are some biased ones, mostly for profit media, such as CNN, and even WSJ which is a business newspaper. Why is that? The simple reason is the media has to please its audience (in the case of CNN, it’s US and western audience), to get viewership and the advertising dollar (which is not an easy thing esp. in this economy).
Once in company gym I asked my colleague (he is African American, BTW): you don’t like watch CNN (the CNN is playing in gym at the time)? He said: I don’t, those media try to meditate you. If you watch too much, you will get meditated. I guess same rules apply to the biased media on the other side. In the case of CNN, there are good ones, and there are bad ones too. Sorry I won’t call names 🙂
I saw the following article at WSJ “The Real Uighur Story” by REBIYA KADEER. Whenever someone claims “the real something”, I am always careful. Here is my favorite comment for the article
Why did not the WSJ invite Ben Laden to give his opinions?
Dah?
In a way the US did. Remember in 1980s when the Soviets was invading the Afganistan, the US government helped the resistence, and some of those resistence joined Al-Qaeda after Soviets pull out. We all know what happened in Sept 11. In a similar fashion, the middle kingdom helped north Vietnam fight against US invasion in 1960/1970s, and in late 1970s Vietnam (the self claimed world No. 3 arm forces) invaded China.
So what’s my point here? My point is for average guy like you and me, we should be really careful when choosing and listening to the media, monitor what the politicians are doing (in the interest of national security blah blah blah). In that sense, I really liked Mark Stanford, and Sara Palin, at least they are honest, and to some extent, (dare I say) George W. Bush. I used to hate his notion:
You are with us, or you are against us.
In some cases he was right. Although he went a bit too far on Iraq.
Appendix: video obtained bu Telegraph in UK. It looks like a shorter version of the Youtube video I posted yesterday. Again use caution as there are lots of violence (blood) in the video.
(Update July 19) Another video from Youtube.