Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

If Dawn could ever be lured away from the prestige and lucre that accompany a glamorous career as a crafter of bons mots, many have suggested employment as a journalism instructor.

Dawn has suspected that a single front page from the New York Times (or any similar rag) could occupy a class for an entire semester simply identifying examples of editorialing and bias. Favorites of Dawn include sentences like, "In order to bring peace to disturbed regions of Iraq, Pres. Bush announced...." No, no, no. Such sentences should read, "Claiming the move was to bring peace to disturbed regions of Iraq, Pres. Bush announced...." Do not accept stated motives as fact. Duh. Another example occurs when neither the NY Times nor the White House count the lives of brown-skinned, non-judeochristian people. Thus, we can have the administration talk of 500-plus deaths in the Iraq war (ignoring the tens of thousand dead Iraqis), and Times pundit and war cheerleader Steven Weisman walk us thru history with recounts of the Spanish American War's suppression of the Philippines wherein "4000 lives" were lost-- when actually over 20,000 Filipino soldiers and over 200,000 Filipino civilians were killed in American actions bordering on genocide. Weisman refers only to the lives that count at America's newspaper of record-- god-fearing Americans'.

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Not that Dawn would confine criticism to print media. A particular egregious blunder occurs on the voice-over lead-in to NBC's dreadful "Law and Order": "In the criminal justice system..." actor Steve Morgan intones, going on to explain that two forces protect the people: police who arrest "those who commit crimes" and prosecutors who seek to punish "the offenders." Again, no, no, no! Police arrest "suspects" and prosecutors prosecute the "accused." But then, NBC is owned by war-profiteer General Electric, so any attempt at non-authoritarian objectivity may be asking too much....