"I'd sure as hell feel a lot better if that kind of information was being delivered by our OWN media"

Ha ha, yeah. To quote Steven Tyler - "Dream on, dream until your dreams come truuuuuuuuuuue!"

I've noticed that the rhetoric dial on the Bush administration goes all the way up to 11.

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I'm not so sure that the problem is the media...While we've got a lot of people who are against the war, we have way more that support it. The problem is that patriotism, not truth, is what sells. The majority doesn't want to hear about the weather conditions are troops are facing, what rules of war Saddam is breaking now (there's rules?), and what role planes are currently playing.
Unfortunately, what the majority wants to hear is what the media will tailor their reports to. Their number one goal isn't to inform us of what's going on, but to make lots of money.

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erm, I mean that the majority doesn't want to hear about the criticism of other countries...They DO want to hear about that stuff.

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I dunno about that. Even here in the Deep South, that majority is a rather slim one, and there are an AWFUL lot of people who share my very deep and abiding concerns with the ethics of this whole thing. Their voice doesn't get heard, though.

Where YOU'RE from, on the other hand, "Impeach Bush" and "No War In Iraq" placards are FAR more prevalent in windows than anything else. And yet I don't see any Seattle-based media giving much information about the political conditions surrounding the war either.

I just don't buy that it's a simple case of "it won't sell" when millions of people all over the country are so fervently anti-war that they protest in the streets. THOSE people buy newspapers and watch TV too, and nobody in the major media is catering any stories to THEIR tastes.

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Oh yes, definitely big anti-war movements...But according to the polls I've seen, there seem to be more people in favor of the war than against it (and this is supported by the people I've talked to at the bar, who mostly sit there watching the news going "bomb the bastards!"). Of course, polls are rather unreliable things, with varying results depending on where they're taken and who's taking the poll, and sitting in a bar isn't exactly active research on opinions.
But I've seen some of the media here giving attention to the political conditions, although it's generally the smaller papers and such, and their columns tend to be more opinion-based than fact-based, but you're right that the major media is doing just this side of nothing to show interest in the anti-war side of the news, except for covering anti-war rallies. I still stand by my opinion that it's because they don't think it'd sell...After all, the primary motivation for running any company is profit, and media companies aren't excluded from this.
If you want a good example of patriotism selling, then take a look at the 9/11 incident. No media source I know of noted that 5,000 lives wasn't actually an extremely large amount, compared to the amount of people that starve to death every day. They also didn't worry about a lot of other results of the incident, and mostly just promoted patriotism...This could be a result of government control, but I think it's more likely a result of the fact that any paper overly criticising our reaction to the whole thing would have quickly been labelled as anti-american and sales would have dropped sharply.

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For more examples of what can happen to people who are percieved as non-patriotic, look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they said they were ashamed to be from the same state as Bush. That wasn't a primarily media sponsored occurance...It was primarily sponsored by the American public's knee-jerk reaction to somebody criticising their country. Apparently, having your own opinion is more of a crime to the average American than prematurely attacking a country.

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I'm well aware of what happened to the Dixie Chicks - but that's the reaction of the segment of the population that listens to Country and Western music, not the populace as a whole. Using C&W radio stations as a barometer for the general population's reaction to war is about like conducting polls at VFW bars - you know damn well what the results will be ahead of time, but they may or may not correspond well with what anybody ELSE thinks.

For comparison's sake, note that alternative rock radio stations DO play, and continue to play, Treble Charger's song "Hundred Million."

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Good points all :P

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