The story of the day is obviously the large pieces in the London Guardian and the New York Times that are based on tens of thousands of documents related to the Afghanistan War published by WikiLeaks. The leak is already being compared to the Pentagon Papers.
How newspapers determine what is most newsworthy about the leaks is interesting. The Guardian‘s lead is:
A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.
So the first item of interest are hundreds of unreported civilian killings.
The New York Times lead, on the other hand,reports that the archive of classified documents “offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.” The second paragraph describes it as a “daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year. ” Ten paragraphs into the piece there is a reference to special ops commandomissions that “claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.”
But the fact that “coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents”? If the Times found that in the WikiLeaks documents, it didn’t think it was worth mentioning.
Why would the NYT consider that news fit to print (at least in a negative light)? As FAIR and others noted, the NYT actively solicited an op-ed to argue the US wasn’t killing enough civilians.
Peter, that’s a classic case of corpress “sit and spin”, wouldn’t you say?
“Sit” on what you can safely leave out, and “spin” the remainder.
How important are dead Afghans? Not very important it seems–I have seen it mentioned in passing that the number is 1.3 million — I have never found an official estimate. That number is like that of the Lancet study of Iraq.
Anyone who has seen the leaked video from Iraq of the US helicopter attack on unarmed civilians knows that the US military simply won’t report most of these humanitarian tragedies, and will deny any reports by Iraqis or Afghanis.
By disregarding or downplaying the widespread civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US media once again demonstrates its complicity with the US war machine.
eVERYONE IS IMPORTANT. eVERYDAY I THINK OF THE OBSTACLES AFGHANS, IRAQIS GO THROUGH IT MUST BE LIVING HELL ON EARTH. WE HAVE IT TOO EASY IN OUR EVERYDAY LIFE IN AMERICA. THESE PEOPLE HAVE SUFFERED SO SO MUCH UP TO TODAY AND WILL KEEP ON SUFFERING. SINCE THE RELEASE OF THESE WIKILEAKS DOCUMENTS THEY STILL SUFFER JUST LOOK AT THE INDIFFERENCE OF THESE REPORTERS HEADLINES ON THE SUBJECT. THAT’S AMERICA CORPORATE HEADLINES NOT THE HEADLINES OF AMERICAN PEOPLE WHO FEEL FOR THE SUFFERING OF AFGHAN PEOPLE AND IRAQI PEOPLE. MAY GOD HELPS US ALL.