Propaganda War hots up between Arab, Western Media by Rashmee. Z. Ahmed Times of India 4:09pm 28th Mar, 2003   TIMES NEWS NETWORK MARCH 27, 2003    LONDON: In the middle of the world's first 'television war', with live CNN, Sky and BBC updates of death and disaster every minute of every day, British press and political opinion has rounded in fury on the Arabic satellite channel al-Jazeera for its "indecent, beyond boundaries and tasteless" TV pictures of dead British soldiers and British PoWs.    On Thursday morning, within hours of having won a major Index of Censorship award, Al Jazeera fought back with vigour, saying it was determined to "show our audience the truth, even if it is a dirty war".    Britain's defence ministry has protested to Al Jazeera, calling on "all other media outlets not to become tools of Iraqi propaganda by rebroadcasting such material."    Commentators say the controversy, which threatens to escalate into a full-scale war between two geographical zones of reportage with distinct points of view, reveals the bitterly-fought propaganda battle.    The Anglo-American coalition forces have droves of 'embedded' reporters but the crackling airwaves of Arab opinion are increasingly making themselves heard as well.    Sami Haddad, senior broadcaster and formerly chief editor of the channel, told the BBC his station was doing the same thing as the Western media, which has consistently screened pictures of bound Iraqi PoWs with machine guns pointing at them. "There was no outrage then", he pointed out, "no talk of breaching the Geneva Convention".    The coverage provided by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera channel has increasingly been seen as a barometer of defiant Arab opinion since the war in Afghanistan. On Thursday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair criticised it as well, authorising his spokesman to reveal his reaction as "horror both at the deaths and that the pictures were shown".    The commander of British forces in the Gulf, Air Marshal Brian Burridge crushingly added that Al Jazeera should take no pride in a film of the bodies of two soldiers lying in a dusty street.    Britain's defence ministry has said that the two dead men shown by Al Jazeera were probably soldiers who went missing during fighting around al-Zubayr, near the southern city of Basra.    Britain's press, public and political outrage appears to focus chiefly on the TV pictures of someone setting foot on the corpses while armed civilians clambered over the British soldiers' burned-out vehicle.    The pictures, originally screened by Iraqi TV, have already sickened Britain's largest-selling tabloid, The Sun, which is shouting itself hoarse with the headline "Saddam executes our boys".    The video, which is believed to have been smuggled to Al Jazeera from southern Iraq, is the second time the station has shown dead coalition soldiers in the ongoing war. Visit the related web page
	Next (more recent) news item
	Next (older) news item