You wake up in the morning. Brush your teeth. Splash the sleep out of your eyes and head for the kitchen for a cup of coffee or tea and whatever is available for breakfast. <\/p>\n
You wander to the living room and search for the remote control. It is in its usual place- stuck inexplicably between the sofa cushions. You turn on the television and stand there flipping from one channel to the other, looking for a news brief or something that will sum up what happened during those six hours you slept. You finally settle on the pleasant face on the screen- the big hair, bright power suit, capped teeth and colorful talons- blandly reading the news. The anchoress is Julie Chan. The program is CBS\u2019s The Early Show (Live from Fifth Avenue!). <\/p>\n
Guess the nationality of the viewer above. Three guesses. American? No. Canadian? No. British? Japanese? Australian? No, no and no. The viewer is Iraqi\u2026 or Jordanian\u2026 or Lebanese\u2026 or Syrian\u2026 or Saudi\u2026 or Kuwaiti\u2026 or\u2026 but you get the picture. <\/p>\n
Two years ago, the major part of the war in Iraq was all about bombarding us with smart bombs and high-tech missiles. Now there\u2019s a different sort of war- or perhaps it\u2019s just another phase of the same war. Now we\u2019re being assailed with American media. It\u2019s everywhere all at once. <\/p>\n
It began with radio stations like Voice of America which we could access even before the war. After the war, there were other radio stations- ones with mechanical voices that told us to put down our weapons and remain inside our homes, ones that fed us American news in an Iraqi dialect and ones that just played music. With satellite access we are constantly listening to American music and watching American sitcoms and movies. To be fair- it\u2019s not just Iraq that is being targeted- it\u2019s the whole region and it\u2019s all being done very cleverly. <\/p>\n
Al-Hurra, the purported channel of freedom, is the American gift to the Arab world. What they do is show us translated documentaries about certain historical events (American documentaries) or about movie stars (American stars) or vacation spots. Throughout this, there are Arab anchors giving us the news (which is like watching Fox in Arabic). It\u2019s news about the Arab world with the American twist. <\/p>\n
Our new \u201cnational\u201d channels are a joke. One of the most amusing, in a gruesome sort of way, is Al-Iraqiya. It\u2019s said to be American sponsored but the attitude is decidedly pro-Iran, anti-Sunni. There\u2019s a program where they parade \u2018terrorists\u2019 on screen for us to see in an attempt to show us that our National Guard are not only good at raiding homes and harassing people in the streets. The funny thing about the terrorists is that the majority of them have \u201cSunni\u201d names like Omar and Othman, etc. They admit to doing things such as having sexual intercourse in mosques and raping women and the whole show is disgusting. Iraqis don\u2019t believe it because it\u2019s so obviously produced to support the American definition of the Iraqi, Sunni, Islamic fanatic that it is embarrassing. Couldn\u2019t the PSYOPS people come up with anything more subtle? <\/p>\n
Then you have the whole MBC collection. MBC is actually financed by Saudi Arabia, but based in Dubai, as far as I know. They have several different channels. It started out with the original MBC which was a mainly Arabic channel that was harmless enough. It showed some talk shows, debates and Egyptian movies with an occasional program on music or style. <\/p>\n
Then we were introduced to MBC\u2019s Al-Arabia- a news channel which was meant to be the Saudi antidote to Al-Jazeera. Simultaneously, we were accessing MBC\u2019s Channel 2, which is a channel that shows only English movies and programs. The programs varied from talk shows like Oprah, to sitcoms like Friends, Third Rock from the Sun and Seinfeld. Earlier this year, the MBC did a mystifying thing. They announced that Channel 2 was going to be made a 24-hour movie channel which would show all sorts of movies- old Clint Eastwood cowboy movies, and newer movies like \u201cA Beautiful Mind\u201d, etc. The programs and sitcoms would be transferred to the new MBC Channel 4.<\/p>\n
Personally, I was pleased with the change at first. I\u2019m not big on movies and it was nice to know our favorite sitcoms and programs would all be accessible on one channel without the annoyance of two-hour movies. I could turn on Channel 4 at any time and expect to find something interesting or humorous that would end within 30-60 minutes. <\/p>\n
The first time I saw 60 Minutes on MBC 4, it didn\u2019t occur to me that something was wrong. I can\u2019t remember what the discussion was, but I remember being vaguely interested and somewhat mystified at why we were getting 60 Minutes. I soon found out that it wasn\u2019t just 60 Minutes at night: It was Good Morning, America in the morning, 20\/20 in the evening, 60 Minutes, 48-Hours, Inside Edition, The Early Show\u2026 it was a constant barrage of American media. The chipper voice in Arabic tells us, \u201cSo you can watch what *they* watch!\u201d *They* apparently being millions of Americans. <\/p>\n
The schedule on MBC\u2019s Channel 4 goes something like this: <\/p>\n
9 am \u2013 CBS Evening News
\n9:30 am \u2013 CBS The Early Show
\n10:45 am \u2013 The Days of Our Lives
\n11:20 am \u2013 Wheel of Fortune
\n11:45 am \u2013 Jeopardy
\n12:05 pm \u2013 A re-run of whatever was on the night before \u2013 20\/20, Inside Edition, etc. <\/p>\n
And the programming continues\u2026<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so\u2026 clean. It\u2019s like hospital food. It\u2019s all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions- 2 minutes on women\u2019s rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once.<\/p>\n
About a month ago, we were treated to an interview on 20\/20 with Sabrina Harman- the witch in some of the Abu Ghraib pictures. You know- the one smiling over faceless, naked Iraqis piled up to make a human pyramid. Elizabeth Vargus was doing the interview and the whole show was revolting. They were trying to portray Sabrina as an innocent who was caught up in military orders and fear of higher ranking officers. The show went on and on about how American troops never really got seminars on Geneva Conventions (like one needs to be taught humanity) and how poor Sabrina was being made a scapegoat. They showed the restaurant where she worked before the war and how everyone thought she was \u201csuch a nice person\u201d who couldn\u2019t hurt a fly! <\/p>\n
We sat there watching like we were a part of another world, in another galaxy. I\u2019ve always sensed from the various websites that American mainstream news is far-removed from reality- I just didn\u2019t know how far. Everything is so tame and simplified. Everyone is so sincere. <\/p>\n
Furthermore, I don\u2019t understand the worlds fascination with reality shows. Survivor, The Bachelor, Murder in Small Town X, Faking It, The Contender\u2026 it\u2019s endless. Is life so boring that people need to watch the conjured up lives of others?<\/p>\n
I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the \u2018insurgents\u2019. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)\u2026<\/p>\n
I\u2019d not only watch *that* reality show, I\u2019d tape every episode. Writing from Baghdad, Riverbend has a suggestion for a TV \u2018reality show\u2019 featuring 15 Bush supporters in a house in Fallujah. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the raids, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the \u2018insurgents<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Iraq"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/riverbendblog.blogspot.com\/2005_04_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#111247654157434704<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"