2010-11-15 In These Times: War News Unfit for Print

"WikiLeaks revelations clearer outside the United States": Andrew Oxford looks at how US media reporting of the WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs has been strikingly different from the rest of the world.

"When five news organizations - including Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera — were granted access to WikiLeaks’ Iraq War Logs before they were published online on October 22, only The Times avoided drawing the same conclusions as its colleagues abroad. The Guardian’s coverage featured headlines such as “Secret Files Show How U.S. Ignored Torture” and “How Friendly Fire Became Routine,” while Le Monde was no less dramatic. Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, published a lengthy editorial titled, “Dumb War: Taking Stock of the Iraq Invasion,” which concluded that the WikiLeaks documents confirm that the war was a failure.

Meanwhile, The Times’ front-page headline assured us “Detainees Fared Worse in Iraqi Hands.” Other American newspapers seemed similarly unimpressed by WikiLeaks’ latest publication of nearly 400,000 classified military documents. The Washington Post printed an editorial declaring that the Iraq War Logs offered no new insights."

Read the full article at In These Times