John Burns, the Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times is not very hip

by Geezer Power 1:35:00 PM PDT


By Geezerpower
April 3, 2007

John Burns, the Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times is not very hip. He likes to play the part, with his afro hair do and has the unshaven appearance of a reporter that is beating the streets of Iraq. But he seems to be expressing his opinions on the war more that doing comprehensive reporting on all of the things going on over there.

I googled "john burns iraq" and the first thing to come up was, News Busters a right wing news source. It started out like this...

"Far be it from me to put in a plug for "Today," but I do hope Nancy Pelosi & Friends were watching this morning. Congressional Dems might be quick to dismiss what President Bush predicts would be the upshot of a date-certain pull-out from Iraq. But perhaps they would not so blithely disregard the observations of one of the most experienced and respected reporters on Iraqi matters . . . a New York Times staffer, no less."

Five articles down I found an interview by PBS On Line News Hour. It was an interview of John Burns and Richard Engel of NBC News. Now this young man in a suit and tie had a completely different view of the war than the worn old guy that looked like a dandylion.

Referring to gruesome footage of the war:

RICHARD ENGEL: I personally don't think they see enough of it, and that's not because I want to put anything gratuitously violent on the air. But this documentary is very different from the normal, very fast, tightly edited pieces that I put on NBC News.

It is much slower. It's very raw. There is no story line, no characters, and no ending, really. It just shows what the war has looked like for me from the ground up.

And often for Iraqi families and for me, that means seeing bodies, having friends who are kidnapped or killed, and I think it reflects what have been the horrors of war.

Also, it shows some times that have been truly heroic, wounded soldiers carrying wounded soldiers out of battle. And I think these extreme situations in war time brings out the very best and the very worst in human nature. And often times in war, in this particular one, it's the worst.

Burns on gruesome footage of the war:

JOHN BURNS: Well, there's no doubt that the editors at the New York Times and other principal newspapers and at the major American television networks exercise their judgment in sparing the reader or the viewer some of the worst violence.

And I think it's probably as well that they do. They do the same thing, after all, when violence occurred elsewhere in the world and, indeed, when it occurs on American streets. That doesn't trouble me a great deal.

Another Burns quote:

And what I found was the American public is extraordinarily well-informed. Whilst there are things we would like to do that we cannot do, I don't think that there are any fundamentally important truths about this war that we have not been able to tell. I don't mean just the New York Times; I mean the other principal American newspapers and the principal television networks.

So I think on that score, the American public has been -- my sense is, at least, talking to Americans, as I say over the last month or so, well-served and that the American voter, the American television viewer, the American newspaper reader knows full well what the state of affairs in Iraq is.

Exercise their judgment in sparing the reader or the viewer some of the worst violence. That doesn't trouble me a great deal.

So all I can say is that John Burns is nothing but a mouth piece for the main stream media, and the man that I once thought was cool is just another purveyor of misinformation for the gorporate Coverment.

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