Toppling Saddam's Statue

Remember that iconic video of Saddam Hussein's statue toppling when we were all amazed at the unstoppable might of the US military?

At the time, many of us knew it was a fraud... not so much faked, but a fraud. Wide shots of the square where it happened showed only a few Iraqis, not the many that were suggested by tight shots framing the small groups (I know about this stuff, one of my jobs is to make half-filled sports events look like they are filled to capacity).

But to suggest it was an organized event planned and executed by a cynical military psy ops or the Bush Administration was always a conspiracy too far for me. Finally, we know what exactly happened there: On the Media did a segment on it. Listen to it or read the transcript.

The upshot is this: US media was invested in the war and wanted to portray it in certain ways -- or risk being the odd outlet out. We have serious problems in this country, largely because of how we have organized the dissemination of media. The outlets tasked with spreading information must focus first and foremost on profits. Not just making profits, but increasing profits every year -- and that does not lend itself to good journalism. The result is a public embarrassingly uninformed public, who are increasingly more confident of how much they know even as they know less and less.

As for this segment, it reminds us that truth is far stranger than fiction.