Saddam In His Underwear…

“I don’t think I have heard anyone on CNN or MSNBC note the common ownership of the Sun and the NY Post and FNC,” a viewer writes in. “All of a sudden the White House is deploring what Murdoch’s newspapers are doing, and you’d think the other guys would be jumping all over it.” “Why is everyone hiding the info about Rupert Murdoch owning both The Sun and the New York Post?,” another e-mailer asks. “If the media was truly liberal, Fox’s link to the photos would be everywhere.”

> Update: 7:49pm: Keith Olbermann mentioned the connection several times on Friday’s Countdown. “We are led to believe that the White House is ‘upset’ with the publication of the photos. The military certainly is. But after the blast against Newsweek, where’s the big blast against Rupert Murdoch for doing something that could damage America’s reputation in the region? Does Murdoch get a pass because he owns the President’s fan club TV network at Fox News?,” he asked a guest…

> Elizabeth Vargas on Friday’s WNT: “The Al Jazeera news channel, which has so much influence in the Arab world, said today it would not air the photographs of Saddam Hussein. Al Jazeera said they were not newsworthy.”

> The question of the day on CNN Saturday Morning: “The photos of Saddam Hussein in his underwear. Do you think it’s news?” Mark said no: “The media knows full well how to ignore certain actions, and responsible media should have ignored the several tabloids that ran the underwear photos.”

> FNC’s John Gibson: “Is it a bad thing to secretly snap a picture of a prisoner in his underwear and give it to the newspapers? I suppose it is. I’m sorry for taking the low road, but this didn’t bother me a bit. He threw people off of buildings, had their tongues cut out, their arms cut off, and a few hundred thousand murdered…”

> Sploid concludes: “When Newsweek briefly mentions well-established and widely reported tales of torture from Guantanomo Bay, the magazine needs to apologize to the White House and the world in general. When the right-wing Bush apologists at the New York Post incite Arab rage, it doesn’t matter because the Arabs are already so ‘backward and barbaric’ that here in the Western World we can’t even comprehend it.”