News War

I lived in a country, Serbia, where at one point the media controlled the people and what they thought.  It was the time of Slobodan Milosevic. The most information came from the government controlled media and the other one (anti government media) was shut down. The reporters who came close to the truth were killed, kidnapped or threatened so that the information wouldn’t leak to the public. Slavko Curuvija was a journalist and a news publisher who was killed in 1999 because he wrote and published the truth and the things that hurt the government and that it gave out their secrets to the public. The episode I watched was about some of the CIA’s and NSA’s secrets that ended up in The New York Times. The government officials were furious about it and they said that it gave the terrorists more knowledge about their tactics. President Bush was telling the newspaper editors to think about what they are publishing and that they shouldn’t reveal the secrets to the public because it is a threat to National Security. Not just that but it made the government look really bad as well because they were doing some illegal stuff too. However, the story still ended up in the newspaper and the editor’s stood by their decision and thought it was right to do it. This whole ordeal reminded me of The Insider, a Michael Mann film that was based on a true story about a whistleblower. Jeffrey Wigand’s interview on CBS’s news program 60 Minutes about “impact boosting”, cigarettes being addictive resulted into a law suit against the Brown & Williamson tobacco company. By the way this is my favorite movie, I recommend you see it if you didn’t already. I used to follow the news a lot; I mean I still do but not as much as I did, and I think you should be informed about what’s going on in the world but don’t trust it all. Most of the time the truth that is hurtful or harmful is not meant to get out but then sometimes it gets out. That can be good or bad, or good and bad at the same time, it depends for whom. I get a headache from it if I get too involved.