PressEthic

The September issue of the Harper’s Magazine ran a first-person account of the propaganda war going on in Iraq under the headline of “Misinformation Intern.” Willem Marx, an Oxford student aspiring to be a war correspondent, wrote about his two-month-long summer internship in Iraq, during which he collected wire stories chosen by the U.S. Army, recreated them into something “that seemed most like Iraqis had written,” with the help of Iraqi translators and eventually bribed Iraqi newspaper editors to run the stories on Iraqi papers, so as to raise a favorable reaction among the Iraqi mass. At the end, of course, our Willem Marx repents his sin and comes back home disillusioned.

It’s funny in a strange way. (I’m happy probably because I’m assured I’m not the greatest sinner in the world of journalism after all. Remember I broke into the voice mail box of someone I hardly knew?) At any rate, the propaganda intern story gave me an insight on how the real world works and how we should act when we encounter the evil.