On The Media: Renaming War on Terror

I forgot to mention in my previous post that another excellent radio program I love is NPR's On The Media, that you can alos podcast, stream, or download. Last Friday's program was interesting and funny. Actually, it always is. The first part had an interesting discussion about terrorism, sparked off by the fact that the folks in the White House have decided to rename the "War on Terror" to "The Global War Against Violent Extremism". [update: It's actually "The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism"; the presenters misspoke.] The next segment was hilarious, even though in a serious and definitely non-funny context. There was an observation that there were two almost identical defiant quotations over a week apart from random unidentified Iraqi citizens about two separate insurgent attacks. So they had an interview with Mr. Unidentified Iraqi, who seemed unable to say anything else in the interview other than the identical words of the quotation again.... Then there's excellent discussion of how the media seem to have problems reporting properly on "difficult numbers" (such as just how much is spent on international aid) on various issues, and a very intersting segment about the appalling state of journalism on health issues. (e.g. more time is given by the major TV networks to weather "news", and training of weather news journalists than is given to health news. And this is where people get most of their health information.....) There's also another excellent segment about media coverage failings in important educational matters: Even though heat waves kill more people in the USA than all other natural disasters combined (I did not know this), the reporting of them never really strikes a serious tone until it is too late. The journalists always seem to go to the sold out air conditioning store and show the empty shelves, or they do the ol' frying an egg on the pavement trick. Meanwhile people (overwhelmingly from the poorer demographic) are dying, of course. The stories are again not given serious journalism attention. There's no attempt to educate the public about heat waves after the facts about how many died, etc, have been documented, because editors treat heat waves only as a "Summer Story", and so nobody is interested in it after the Summer has gone. The same mistakes are made every year because the local government emergency services only officially get into action to deal with heat wave emergencies only after the media begin to report casualties. There's much more in the show (such as discussion of the murder of a journalist in Haiti, the launch of the "Africa Channel" -to show positive stuff about Africa to Americans for a change- and the letter of a group of angry Ukrainian journalists to their new President.) I am always surprised and impressed about just how much great stuff they cram into one hour. Its just a fantastic radio show. Download it, stream it, or pod it, and have a listen. -cvj