> Fox News is engaged in scaremongering about the looting
> to reinforce the ideology among their white middle class
> audience that the poor black people in New Orleans are
> animals who get what they deserve.
<snip>
> Fox News should be blown off the face of the earth.
Quite literally.
I remember when the US bombed the Tanjung news/propaganda agency in Serbia for inciting ethnic hatred and violence. I doubt very much that Tanjung did anything worse than what 19th Century Fox does every day, and what they're doing in this situation rises to the level of complicity in a criminal act by the government.
One of those good progressive lawyers who does quixotic work on "international law" (there are several of them but I can't remember any names) should tally up all of the international protocols that the US wantonly violated in this situation to the detriment of its own population. Number one on the list, of course, is the every-man-for-himself way the evacuation was handled, with people with cars making it out but all of the public-transit-dependent black, elderly and poor people left behind. This is gross negligence on the part of the state that would rise to the level of a war crime in any conflict situation. News agencies that minimize the extent of the disaster -- or more accurately, minimize the government's culpability for it and demonize the population under attack, with vague references to "bandits" or "criminal elements" or what-have-you -- are themselves complicit in these crimes. I'll bet you could come up with half-a-dozen examples of famine or disaster areas around the world where governments reacted in a smiliar fashion that meant mass death for members of some hated minority. Let's see how the US stacks up against the Sudanese regime or the Nigerian military in Biafra or what-have-you. There are surely plenty of parallels, and by the same token there are parallels between 19th Century Fox on the one hand and Tanjung or Julius Streicher on the other.
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories