By: E&P Staff In his column today, Tribune Media Services writer Bob Koehler criticizes much of the mainstream media for the way they've covered the Blackwater shootings and the aftermath of that tragedy.
Blackwater private-security personnel from the U.S. killed 17 Iraqi civilians last September in Baghdad. No one fired on the Blackwater people first, according to eyewitnesses. The U.S. is investigating the shootings, but the seriousness of that investigation is in doubt given that the State Department renewed Blackwater's contract anyway.
Koehler writes: "The Los Angeles Times, for instance, in its May 4 story about the investigation of the Nisoor Square massacre, doesn't trouble us with references to other Blackwater shooting sprees; much less the larger context of invasion, mission accomplished, and five years of occupation in which more than a million Iraqis have died....
"If it had done so, the massacre in question would suddenly be a piece in a far larger picture that would make almost all Americans recoil in shame."
The columnist adds: "It's hard for me to read anything about Iraq in the mainstream media without being tormented by the way it's written: especially by what I would call the requisite spin and omission. Thus every travesty of our occupation, every hellish mishap, every stealth brutality that somehow finds its way into the spotlight, is presented to us context-free. This is the media's ongoing gift to George Bush (and John McCain)."
Koehler's complete column can be seen
here.
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