According to the Indianapolis Star, the reporting from Guantanamo will be less diverse:
Now, the Pentagon has shut down access entirely — at least temporarily — expelling reporters this week and triggering an outcry from human rights groups, attorneys and media organizations even as the prison comes under renewed criticism for the suicides of three detainees last weekend.
As reported by Thinkprogress, the Pentagon
shut down access entirely to the Guantanamo Bay prison after the suicide deaths of three detainees. Journalists covering the suicides had their clearances revoked and were immediately flown back to the United States, and regular visits between detainees and their lawyers were cancelled.
Well, with one exception. FOX still has access. As Thinkprogress reports, Fox News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano continues to have access and has continued to offer his “fair and balanced” review of prison conditions. Napolitano recently reported on the “now gentle, almost child-like the way they treat the detainees.”
Yeah, I guess that after torturing those guys for years, depriving them of any contact with loved ones and refusing to even tell them what they are charged with, they’ve become “child-like,” especially when we put them in chains and hoods and work extra hard to keep more of them from killing themselves. Now that not even the semi-credible wing of the mainstream media is here to report on your mistreatment, do any of you guys have any complaints about the facility?
Once again, keeping out the journalists solves a big problem for W. Where the sun doesn’t shine, everything is fine.
Now we see where media bias becomes an actual problem. I don't mind the Fox blowhards delivering their rhetoric from the same footing of everyone else- they have the right to do so, of course- but when the spin-meisters have more access to knowledge, something needs to change immediately.
On a more optimistic note, I hope that this selective sharing of information will smack of corruption to the American public. Hopefully it will suggest that the government has kept something hidden from us at Guantanamo Bay. In reality I don't consider this all that likely.
Fox "News" — a.k.a., Faux News — uses many tricks to distort the news and spin a pro-Bush, pro-Republican message. When they interview people, they will often fail to fully disclose their guests' (biased) affilliations. Another technique, which I saw just today, is to interview two Republicans (one MUCH farther to the right than the other), rather than one Republican and one Democrat: the obvious goal to make the more moderate Republican seem more mainstream. Another technique, which I've seen many, many times, is to have one Republican and one Democrat, where the Republican is a well-informed, senior Member of Congress, and the Democrat is an ill-informed, junior Member of Congress: the obvious goal to make the Democrat (and, by extension, all Democrats and their positions) look stupid. Yet another technique, which I've also seen many times, is to throw open-ended, softball questions to Republicans, and combative, closed-ended, leading questions to Democrats. Another is to outnumber Democrats, by having two (or more) Republican guests and just one Democrat.
I don't watch Fox often, but virtually every time I have watched it, I have seen the news distorted in these or other ways.