A Quote by Tariq Ali
During the Gulf War, journalists used to challenge government news managers and insisted they wouldn't just accept the official version of events.
Related Quotes
Journalists go to press briefings at the Ministry of Defense in London or the Pentagon in Washington, and no critical questions are posed at all. It's just a news-gathering operation, and the fact that the news is being given by governments who are waging war doesn't seem to worry many journalists too much.
Citizen journalists can attend events traditional journalists are kept from - or have overlooked - or find and highlight the small but evocative story happening right next door. By tapping this resource, news sites can extend their reach and help redefine news gathering in the digital age.
I remember during the Gulf War, my father's ship had just finished a deployment in in the Gulf and was on its way back when the war started in Kuwait. They turned around and went back to the Gulf.
If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. Pentagon official, on why US military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War In time of war the first casualty is truth.
We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.
It's true: Whenever I see a government rule that could clearly be used to punish people for doing innocuous things, it is never enough for some government official to just assure me that it won't be used that way. Those assurances, after all, aren't binding; they're lip service.
Our military superiority is so great - it's far greater than it was in the Gulf War, and the Gulf War was over in 100 hours after we bombed for 43 days. And so now they can bomb for a couple of days and then just roll into Baghdad... The odds are there's going to be a war and it's going to be not for very long.
As journalists, we cannot swallow the official line without question. We should challenge almost everything that dictators, presidents and officials say.
The Internet is pushing us - in good ways and in bad - to realize that the official version of events shouldn't always be trusted or accepted without question.
I covered the first Gulf War in Saudi Arabia and Israel for ABC News.
In 1961, an official U.S. commission oversaw thousands of events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American Civil War. All 50 states joined in, but not surprisingly, the biggest events took place in the 11 southern states that made up the defeated Confederacy.
Journalists are supposed to be skeptical, that's what keeps them digging rather than simply accepting the official line, whether it comes from government or corporate bureaucrats.
Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as functionaires, functionaries, not journalists.
One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you'd see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.
Because they're my stories, they're my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.
Japan suffered terribly from the atomic bomb but never adopted a pose of moral superiority, implying: 'We would never have done it!' The Japanese know perfectly well they would have used it had they had it. They accept the idea that war is war; they give no quarter and accept none. Total war, they recognize, knows no Queensberry Rules. If you develop a devastating new weapon during a total war, you use it; you do not put it into the War Museum.
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