Last night, Jon Snow of C4 News grilled the Iranian President on his state’s ‘quest for nuclear weapons’ and his alleged ‘holocaust denial’. The interview was so aggressive and one sided, that it recalled the grilling of Tariq Aziz on BBC in the build up to the Iraq invasion in 2003.
JON SNOW – CORPORATE ATTACK DOG
August is a bad month for marketing. But not so September, which is a traditional kick off month for all kinds of corporate advertising campaigns. And lo and behold, last night’s Channel 4 News fitted the bill perfectly for ‘selling’ the White House’s up gearing campaign for the next war, this time on Iran. Launching into a full frontal assault on an affable, polite Ahmadinejad, C4 ‘celebrity reporter’ Jon Snow repeatedly accused his government of ‘seeking nuclear weapons’ (no evidence provided, but never mind about such trifles, and of course the West has a divine right to accumulating many thousands of the things without any questions being asked), then insisted the dastardly Iranians were ‘destabilising and promoting violence in Iraq’ (no irony intended, obviously), ‘deliberately killing British soldiers’ (hey, come on), then when all these failed to get results, repeatedly attacking him personally as a ‘Holocaust denier’. Now while Ahmadinejad’s views on the scale of the Holocaust might well be questionable, the crux of his argument actually boiled down to ‘why should the Palestinians have to suffer for these atrocities, which had nothing to do with them?’ – a reasonable point of view, surely.
SPLIT SCREEN
Most disturbing of all however was a split screen (that C4 for inexplicable reasons interposed on the above attack dog style ‘interview’), the other half screen repeatedly showing wholly unrelated and suggestive newsreel of Iranian test missiles being fired off in the desert, or on parade. Why? Is this legitimate ‘documentary news’ practice? What earthly purpose could it serve? In fact, it seems our ‘free and fair’ media has well and truly sunk to the manipulative propagandist levels of Pravda in the 1970s. UK media is becoming an increasingly blatant mouthpiece for its corporate and state/ super-state sponsors.
Footnote:
People may have noticed a recent press story about ‘Russian aircraft invading British air space in cold war style aggressive missions’. No, not just that, but also implying that these intruders may be ‘nuclear armed’. However, the allegedly contemporary photo shots that accompany the ‘story’ actually show ancient turbo-prop Tupelov 95 ‘Bear’ bombers, perhaps a state of the art Soviet warhead delivery system in the early 1960s, and definitely used no later than the 1980s as spy planes after being withdrawn from front line service. Even more bizarrely however, and uncommented on in any of our lapdog media sources, is the fact that these pictures (taken last week, they would have us believe) clearly show old Soviet RED STARS on the tail. Erm, correct me if I am wrong but didn’t the USSR cease to exist 15 years ago?
