Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Glen Greenwald on the Selective Vision of U.S. Media

Glen Greenwald of Slate makes an excellent point in this article. He mentions several journalists who have been imprisoned by the U.S. on little to no evidence of wrongdoing, yet that this is covered very little by U.S. journalists, or is justified because it is the U.S. doing it. The central point is here:

"Lake goes on to suggest that even if the journalists we imprisoned weren't guilty, it's still different when we do it, because we're the U.S. and they're Iran. And there is a perfect distillation of moral relativism: the rightness of an act is determined not by the act itself, but by who is doing it ("when I do X, it's good; when you do it, it's evil"). It also perfectly illustrates what is, as I noted on Friday, "the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: everything is different, and better, when we do it."

This is "American exceptionalism" at its worst, and is an attitude far too deeply ingrained in both press and public, much less elected officials, in my opinion.

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