mainstream media, NYT:
It’s in the leftmost sections of the nation’s conservative, dominant (so-called mainstream) and corporate media that you best discern where concentrated economic and political power set the outer parameters of permissible discourse.
(...) Is this all perhaps part of the answer to the great supposed mystery of “Why They Hate Us?” Dominant U.S. media’s powerful, opinion-shaping unwillingness and/or inability to acknowledge the victimization of people on the wrong side of our imperial guns is part of a broader devaluation of non-North American and non-white lives in U.S. culture. We are obsessed with the tragic murder of 32 innocent students at Virginia Tech but cannot bring ourselves to focus on routinely larger and daily civilian body counts in occupation-mangled Iraq.
(...) We offer hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about three U.S. soldiers ambushed south of Baghdad last May. We value the life of innocent civilians murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001 at $1.8 million. Meanwhile we give the comparatively tiny sums amounts of $500-$2500 to the surviving family members of innocent civilians we butcher in the name of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan (Mitchell 2007; Engelhardt 2007).
(...) “Our” media has spent more energy mourning the death of a fallen U.S. horse (Barbaro) than it has on the death of untold thousands of children in U.S.-occupied Iraq.
(...) We killed 3 million Indochinese people during the 1960s and 1970s and spent the next three decades agonizing over what the Vietnam War did to us – the real victims.
(...) And who can forget the famous nationally televised comment of the “liberal” Bill Clinton administration’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright regarding the murder of half a million Iraqi children by U.S.-led economic sanctions. It’s a hard choice, she said, but added “we think he price is worth it” (Stahl 1996). The Madame Secretary did not comment on whether the parents of the deceased juveniles agreed with her curious imperial cost accounting.
(...) The U.S. GI deaths in Mesopotamia are terrible of course, but they reflect legitimate resistance efforts by an illegally occupied people who have suffered from the U.S. invasion on a scale that makes American “sacrifice” look minor indeed.