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From
Abc News Online
http://www.abc.net
Media tycoon lashes
Western media over Iraq
June 11, 2003
Press tycoon Conrad Black
has lashed out at the European media for their coverage of the US-led war against
Iraq, accusing the BBC of propagandistic coverage.
Meanwhile British journalist
Robert Fisk of the London newspaper The Independent has accused the United States
and Britain of lying about Iraq.
Mr Black whose titles
include London newspaper the Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun Times and the Jerusalem
Post, was speaking at a congress of the World Association of Newspapers.
He has criticised two
BBC programs for what he says were "perverse and propagandistic criticism of US
international policy".
Mr Black also took exception
to a picture in Britain's mass-circulation Daily Mirror showing Prime Minister
Tony Blair with bloody hands.
"Americans are presented
as lumpen proletariat, firearm fanatics, addicted to violent films, dumbed-down
television and un-nutritious food," the Canadian-born press lord complained.
"Much of the western media,
by mindlessly pandering to a spirit of envy, is promoting such a retrograde move,"
he said.
"The international media
should stop denigrating the one country of fact and purpose in the world."
At a separate meeting,
Mr Fisk said the Anglo-American authorities had set up a press censorship committee,
a fact which he said had not been published in the West.
"Officially it's not called
that but Louis Bremer's so-called Coalition Provisional Authority has set up a
legal committee to examine how restrictions should be clamped on Iraq's new and
free press, to eliminate, in the words of a diplomat, the wilder stories that
might provoke incitement to ethnic hatred," he said.
"What the Iraqis need
is journalistic help, rather than censorship."
He recalled the incident
in which an American tank had fired at a Baghdad hotel in which the foreign press
was lodged, killing two pressmen.
He says the American army
claimed shots had been fired from the hotel at the tank and the shots had stopped
when the tank fired.
"This was a lie. I was
between the tank and the hotel and there was no shooting," he said.
"Had there been, I would
not have been on the streets myself that morning. French television was running
videotape of the tank for four minutes before it fired.
"The soundtrack is silent.
There was no shooting. So why were my colleagues killed? All of us should continue
to demand an answer."
ENDS
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