Submitted by John Stauber on
The New York Times today reports that "in interviews with two dozen New Yorkers, most people said the desire for peace outweighed any impulse for vengeance, even among those directly affected" by the September 11 terrorist attack. Across the U.S. tens of thousands of Americans are already participating in peace rallies calling for military restraint and criticizing the U.S. media for poor reporting of U.S. military and foreign policies leading up to the terrorist attack. How will the news media cover and depict this unfolding peace movement and its views? One of the main TV networks, NBC, is a subsidiary of a major military contractor, GE. In every war a nation's media tends to accept some degree of news censorship and to propagandize for victory. Will voices for peace be responsibly included in U.S. media coverage, or will the diverse and growing groups of citizens who are nonviolent critics of U.S. policy be marginalized and denounced in the media as unpatriotic or anti-American?