Columnist makes erroneous claims

Re: “The Media’s Military,” Opinion, Aug. 22

To the Editor:

“The Media’s Military,” by Billy McMorris, was filled with so much incorrect information and so many ridiculous accusations that it both shocked and enraged me. Firstly, Mr. McMorris attacks the public for entrusting “its information to The New York Times and CNN.” Perhaps he would prefer us to instead watch the far-right Fox News so that we could watch Ann Coulter go about her air-headed publicity stunt tirades or be brain-washed into thinking the Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are the same thing. Secondly, Mr. McMorris suggests that the American media did not do enough to glorify the American soldiers in Iraq. He may, however, remember the story of Jessica Lynch, who became an American heroine by the American press to only later discover that it was an Iraqi doctor who was in fact the hero. Finally, and most notably, Mr. McMorris claims that “doctored photos of seemingly brutal scenes” from the war in Lebanon were omnipresent in the United States. His statement is so outrageous that I don’t know whether to be infuriated or to laugh. Doctored photos? There was no reason to doctor photos in a war that killed over 1,000 Lebanese people — the overwhelmingly majority of whom were innocent civilians, displaced a quarter of the population, and cost several billion dollars to a nation that was already billions of dollars in debt. In fact, most news-aware Americans do not know these facts, nor do they know that the Lebanese coastline was ruined and marine life killed when Israeli jets hit a power plant spilling around 15,000 tons of heavy fuel oil into the Mediterranean Sea, nor that Israelis killed dozens of Lebanese soldiers who were not involved in Israel’s fight with Hezbollah. Mr. McMorris is most certainly right when he says, “We know who the press is rooting for in this war.”

Nora N. Choueiri ’10