PROJECT CENSORED - Assignment Example

Due to the fact that the media heaped such a high degree of praise on these individuals that were working to employ acts of terrorism to overthrow a government, it begged the question as to why the Western press was so single-minded on the approach to this issue. This brief analysis will consider a solitary news report from the Telegraph and juxtapose this with the information that other news outlets continued to put forward to their viewership on a daily basis. Due to the fact that censorship takes a variety of forms, it will be the purpose of this brief analysis to consider how and why the main media outlets willingly chose to ignore such a massive story as the one which the Telegraph related.

To briefly summarize the time period in which this article came out, the reader should understand that tensions within the Middle East had been fomenting as a result of the Arab Spring. Although it will not be the goal of this essay to discuss whether the Arab Spring was in and of itself a popular uprising of the people groups of Middle Eastern nations or the manufactured malcontent that Washington is famous for inspiring, it should however be considered the extent and scope within which the United States was involved in the Libyan uprising from its earliest days in Benghazi.

At the point that this article was published, the Libyan uprising had been ongoing for a period of around 2 months. The article itself was titled, “Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links” and published on the 25 of March 2011. Although such an admission may seem banal, the fact of the matter was that this firsthand statement from the opposing side worked to affirm the similar statements that then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had been advocating since the rebels began engaging in terrorism in Benghazi back in February of the same year.

Due to the overall unpopularity of such a viewpoint, the article was practically the only one of its time. However, the fact that a premier Libyan Revolutionary would openly admit to a Western news source that his fighters had known Al Qaeda linkages was a news story that the mainstream press was none too interested in putting forward as the entire political spectrum within the United States supported NATO action within Libya to overthrow the stable and long-standing government of Gaddafi (Swami 2011).

It is not the purpose of this analysis to put forward why such a news story was itself inherently offensive to the Western media so much so that such a bombshell news story could go practically unnoticed, however, one could safely surmise that the powerful interests behind the scenes (oil companies and a plethora of other MNCs) wished Gaddafi to be toppled so that they may have new markets for their products. Similarly, due to the fact that only a handful of major conglomerates own a lion’s share of the Western media, it is somewhat surprising that such a story made it into the mainstream press whatsoever; if only for such a brief and unnoticed article.

The fact that Al Qaeda openly supported the Libyan rebels was no secret to those that carefully followed the revolution. Gaddafi as well as key observers had been frenetically attempting to warn the West before they bandwagoned together and