From now on, our template for understanding the UN….it has been our template for the Old Media for quite a while
Mark Steyn finds the right and repellent metaphor:
It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix ‘em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: in the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than Bush and Blair did.
And, of course, corrupt organisations rarely stop at just one kind. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food programme, don’t worry, whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits – in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves.
That’s exactly correct, isn’t it? How do they get away with it? You know the answer:
[T]he merest glimpse of a freaky West Virginia tramp leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with girlie knickers on his head was enough to prompt calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam’s torture chambers were now open “under new management”, and for Robert Fisk to be driven into the kind of orgasmic frenzy unseen since his column on how much he enjoyed being beaten up by an Afghan mob: “Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi,” wrote Fisk. “No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash.”
Outrage! but what about this?
The Third Infantry Division are raping nine-year olds in Ramadi. Ready, set, go! That thundering sound outside your window isn’t the new IKEA sale, but the great herd of BBC/CNN/Independent/Guardian/New York Times/Le Monde/Sydney Morning Herald/Irish Times/Cork Examiner reporters stampeding to the Sunni Triangle. Whoa, hold up, lads, it’s only hypothetical.
Yes, as the Washington Times article by Douglas MacKinnon says today, there’s a lot of mischief, not only in story editing and angle, but in story selection:
[T]he conduct of CNN during the last week of this controversy was nothing short of unethical, unprofessional and ultimately damaging to “The Most Trusted Name in News,” the tag-line that, as “journalists,” they have given to themselves. Even though CNN is at the center of the very storm their news president created, they chose to ignore the story. Why? Isn’t the Eason Jordan case “news”? Wouldn’t CNN have covered it if a competing news president had made such irresponsible and inflammatory remarks? In a New York minute.
I have a number of friends at CNN whom I know to be honest, ethical and hard working. I have to believe that they are horrified and ashamed that their own network ignored a major story about their own news president. It is for that reason that the death knell for the liberal mainstream press has been sounded. CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and the major left-leaning newspapers — such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA TODAY and many others — made a conscious decision to keep a major news story away from the American people.
We’ve written this story many times. How many times more? Well, as the New York Sun notes, the Old Media are starting to run out of people:
Taken in isolation, the departures of the New York Times’s executive editor, Howell Raines, and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd; the managing editor of the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather, and three other CBS executives; and the executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN, Eason Jordan, would each be big events. Taken together, they suggest a news industry in the midst of a stunning revolution.
Faster, please.