STORIES MY EDITORS CHOOSE NOT TO RUN

It's horrific what you can find on Google news lately if you type in Gaza. I did it this morning. Well ya, I cheated cause I saw the footage yesterday too. And, man! It made me feel like turning on happy music and close my eyes and imagine I am on another planet. Five children killed on a football field on an Israeli attack. A six moth old child killed yesterday in another Israeli attack.

Boy wounded in a „militant missile attack” on Sderot. And one headline I liked „ Child victims of Gaza war lie close, but apart”. A story about the Israeli child and a Palestinian child both wounded in the attacks recovering in the same Israeli hospital near Tel Aviv.

The images are pretty shocking, and yet most of the people I showed them to answered carelessly „So what? It happens everyday.” The editor I'm working with decided not to run the footage of the baby killed in Gaza. I insisted. He kept saying no. Well, the footage is shocking but it doesn't show the child ripped apart, does it? „'Cause that's what people want to see.” Like people care to see what bull shit Hillary Clinton has to say in the electoral campaign or the way Barack Obama is dressed in a muslim outfit and why his name is Hussein (oh, yeah, he is REALLY guilty of that). But we still have to write and feed the viewers that shit.

Ya, I guess it does happen everyday. I'm sure it happens everyday in other parts of the world too. Parts of the world we don't CARE about. Like THIS part of the world.

It makes me remember another story that actually seemed to me taken from a cheap horror sci-fi book. A story about Tigris river. It lately is a GRAVEYARD.
Every day local police haul bodies from the Tigris bearing signs of torture. Locals who live near the river constantly see floating bodies. The situation is even worse in Suwayrah, a southern area of the capital, where the government has built barriers with huge iron nets to trap plants and garbage dropped in the river but now THEY TRAP BODIES. Well I remember the answer I got from the editor. Laughter. „This is not a story! This is a stuck sewage problem in Iraq.” Well, yeah, people normally die in a war. But that doesn't mean that war is normal. When did it become so normal that we don't care to notice it?

Well, there was a story yesterday about war that made it to the headlines and made everybody run it and get the audience they crave. Stupid prince Harry „fighting” in Afghanistan. Yeah, like really fighting! Um, seen him dressed as a soldier, weapon in his hand walking around near a wall, actually touching the dust. Isn't that pretty! CNN had an hour long special report on the event. I loved the fact Adriana, the evening newscast editor chose not to run it. That woman has principles.

Well I guess Condi Rice is worried. And she told Ehud Olmert she is W.O.R.R.I.E.D. She's worried about children being killed. Let's just wait until the children grow up and turn like maybe 17. Then, ok, you can kill them. That's the age when they suddenly become „militants”. (BTW, pictures belong to Reuters).