Irony is Dead
Reported by Nancy - June 22, 2004 -
At 12:46pm today, Fox News Live reported that AP was reporting that Al Jazeera was reporting that the South Korean hostage being held by terrorists had been executed.
For the next 14 minutes, Fox was agog with "outrage". The beheading was called "barbaric" & "heinous" (without noting that beheading is the legally-approved form of execution in Saudi Arabia). They repeatedly mentioned the killing of Daniel Pearl as a similar barbarity (without noting that Pearl was executed with a revolver). They dredged up their favorite "foreign affairs analyst", Marc Ginsberg, to pontificate. They repeatedly showed the video of the hostage kneeling in front of 3 armed & masked men, while piously proclaiming that they would not air footage of the actual execution, even if it became available. Even though there was, at that point, no official statement from Bush, they used an old Bush statement ("they don't want a free & democratic Iraq") & claimed that this is how Bush would describe these killers. In all those 14 minutes, they never once mentioned the man's name: Kim Sun-il.
Comment: Aside from the obvious racist implications of never mentioning the man's name (as though only US hostages are people), Fox always manages to avoid any deeper exploration. Why are hostages like these routinely referred to as "innocent civilians" when they work for the military? What about the 10,000+ innocent Iraqi civilians the US & coalition forces have killed since we invaded Iraq? Why is the US the only "First World" country that routinely imposes the death penalty? Is electrocution more benign than beheading?
