Djelloul Marbrook

Our mortuarial media bury the truth shovelful by shovelful and then plant fake grass to hide the crime. Hour by hour, image by image, developments are heaped on the slain body of the big picture.

Take Iraq (we shouldn’t have taken it). The gas bags in Washington endlessly debate troop levels, sectarianism, casualties, Iran, lies, bad intelligence, and no intelligence, while bungling contractors are over there stuffing their pockets. It used to be called war profiteering. Now it’s called nation-building.

The big picture, the repugnant story of corporate piracy at the expense of human life, is buried every day by avalanches of facts. The mortuarial press is hard at work burying the dead body. No body, no crime.

Iraq is the most tragic example of this aspect of news as entertainment, but hardly the only one.

The concept of the newspaper opinion page—news web sites tend to emulate this practice—was to put the unremitting flow of events into proper perspective. But this noble idea has been corrupted by egocentric punditry in which we reward fatheads for being wrong and shun prophets for being right.

The opinion page was meant to exhume the dead body of the truth and
test its DNA. Instead we get well-written screeds by ideologues and ax-grinders of every stripe. The idea of helping people understand what’s going on is in the round file.