Ever since I was a student at ISU, I remember reading in the Daily about regional conflicts in various parts of the world.

I always wondered how the media chose to report on specific conflicts and ignore others.

A recent example would be the violence in Kosovo and how we used threats of NATO airstrikes to stop the killing of ethnic Albanians.

The media had gone crazy with special reports from Kosovo, talking about the hardships of ethnic Albanians and the need for us to intervene and stop the “evil” Serbs from murdering civilians.

It is easy to label. The Serbs themselves called the Kosovo Liberation Army a terrorist group.

Yet the media’s persistence in blaming the Serbs for everything wrong convinced us and set the foundations for an imminent attack against another country that would just be “intervention.”

Yes, our country always fights for justice and freedom in the world! However, we select when and who we accuse of human rights violations.

Take Turkey, a close NATO ally and friend. It’s a country with great potential that suffers from strong, socio-political problems.

It’s a democracy, but the real power behind the scenes is the military, NATO’s second largest military machine after the United States itself.

When the Turkish generals don’t like the new government, what do they do? They force it to step down.

But what do the generals do when a repressed ethnic minority like the Kurds wants self-rule?

Since 1984, more than 30,000 people have died in Southeastern Turkey. Thousands of villages have been destroyed. Not even one tenth of this happened in Kosovo, and the media have gone crazy.

Where have the media been in this conflict? Only a few days ago, Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK, was arrested in Italy when arriving in Rome.

Turkey’s call for his extradition prompted Kurdish demonstrations throughout the world.

How much time did our media spend on this?

I only heard something about the Iraqi Kurds fighting Saddam for self-rule. They are “good Kurds.”

You never hear about the Turkish Kurds. They fight the Turkish generals, our friends and allies. They are “evil Kurds.”

Who said our government doesn’t control the media?

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Bob Alexander

Alumnus

Ames