I recently came across an intriguing research, conducted by a Washington based research group. The research analysed the news reports for the month of April and found out that the American Presidential campaign has taken up almost 33% of the editorial space, followed by general economy which took almost 6%. The Pope’s visit and the Texas polygamy case equally shared an editorial space of 4% each. It is intriguing that as bodies of innocent American soldiers and that of equally innocent Iraqi’s kept falling, it could garner only 3% of editorial space!! It is not to draw any conclusion whether the American Presidential campaign is more important than Iraq, but then the media coverage in itself indicates that though Iraq is a burning global issue, the American media doesn’t feel likewise, otherwise it would not have given a mere 3% space. And the bigger issue here is that by reducing media space over a period of time, the American media is systematically trying to take Iraq out of people’s memory as well. In fact a careful analysis and one would realise that some media houses have gone ahead in terms of justifying American engagement in Iraq!! So much for the great American democracy where an independent and honest media is supposed to form the key pillar!! It is not a recent phenomenon, but for long, great thinkers of the likes of Noam Chomsky had been extremely critical about the manner the American media had been manufacturing and disseminating news! In fact in his book Media Control, Prof Chomsky had elaborately talked about the history of American media propaganda machinery! Also that it is no secret that today, American media is controlled by five big media conglomerates and has been seemingly evident, time and again, that they have been covertly catering to American Administration’s interest! It is a fact that mainstream media has always shared a very cosy relationship with the American Administration and has been the apparent mouthpiece of it. It is also a fact that Pentagon had time and again used media to build up reasons to engage with Iraq! Not just that, the same was done to build up the progressive image of Afghanistan after the American military engagement in the region! In fact this arrangement had worked wonderfully well with the media houses as well. For that matter, it doesn’t make any sense for General Electric to report about Iraq, through MSNBC, simply because it is only on account of Iraq that their production lines for Apache helicopters have been running full! Though unfortunate, the fact remains that for years American news and information has been commoditised and has been blatantly sold to American households. And worse is the fact that this media industry has had such a dominating strong stranglehold that reporters who investigated and reported truth got stifled. If this sham and pretence of democracy in America by control of information dissemination is not good enough then like the mystery of disappearing kids from Delhi

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