Multiple opinions are presented in this article. Most of them are basically: "The Americans deliberately targeted journalists in order to suppress the truth about civilian massacres." The other two types of opinions are: - Journalists were caught in the crossfire just as other civilians are being caught in the crossfire, but weren't being specifically targeted by the Americans. - The Iraqi regime deliberately set things up to provoke retaliatory action towards areas where journalists were located, in order to cause journalist casualties and thereby discredit the U.S. in the international media. My own opinion is that the truth is one of, or a combination of, the latter two explanations. The first idea, even though it seems to be widely held in the Arab media, seems to me to be patently absurd, since if anything, killing journalists is guaranteed to bring *more* attention to the killing of non-combatants, not less. Then again, I have to take into account their frame of reference, which is that many of them are coming from countries where unfavorable journalism *is* routinely dealt with via violent tactics and/or "disappearing" journalists. |