Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald: a rare gem
Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist who deserves serious respect for cutting edge reporting, has a thoughtful piece in Salon.com with the self-explanatory title: The “Bomb Iran” contingent’s newfound concern for The Iranian People.
Glenn’s article begins:
I’m going to leave the debate about whether Iran’s election was “stolen” and the domestic implications within Iran to people who actually know what they’re talking about (which is a very small subset of the class purporting to possess such knowledge).
He’s right of course. What the hell do any of us know about what’s really going on in Iran – a country which, in my case at any rate, is half a world away?
Even so, the humble blogger can serve a useful purpose, it seems to me – if only to point out what’s missing (or almost missing) in the mainstream media narrative.
Over the last day, protests have continued in Iran. There have been sizeable demonstrations – for and against President Ahmadinejad. Fortunately, there appears to have been no repeat of the violence on Sunday evening that cost several lives.
While protestors, it appears, remain free to protest, western correspondents been confined to the luxury hotels where they spend most of their time anyway. Naturally, this is widely-reported as an outrage by the war-pimps of Fox News, CNN, the BCC and Australia’s own conformist media.
I support unrestrained, honest reporting – whether in Tehran or Timbuktu. But there’s a limit to the hypocrisy I can stomach, even from this distant perch.
The voice of protest in Georgia, not so loud in the western media
If the western media in that region have time on their hands and a thirst for covering anti-government protests, why don’t they head over to Tbilisi’? In Georgia, anti-government protestors have been toughing it out with western-backed government forces for two months.. and counting.
Georgian anti-government protestors said, when this round of protests began in mid-April, that they won’t give up until the government of CIA-stooge Mikael Saakashvili, who climbed to power on the back of a Soros-sponsored ‘Rose Revolution’ that overthrew an elected President, has finally gone.
To date, this ongoing drama has been little reported in the ‘free world’. Westerners who noticed it must have been paying exceptionally close attention to world events. Quite a contrast with Iran, whose post-election protests continue to attract 24×7 coverage!
To paraphrase the author of Animal Farm, all anti-government protests are of equal news value…. but some are more equal than others. See:
