Read a more informed and intelligent account on this topic by Paul Keating here:http://www.australianpolitics.com/media/00-06-14keating.shtml

Extract from the Broadway hit, "The Media Game":

(Scene shifts to the Oval Office, a couple of years from now.)

The President is gazing into the middle-distance. A man, looking suspiciously like Dorian Gray approaches. He speaks with an Australian accent.

"Georgie Boy! Ol' Monkey Man! Mate, you're the prince of externalizers."

"Rupe, flattery will get you everywhere. Pull up a chair and have a soy, - er, soylent biscuit."

"Geez, George! How do you do that trick with your nostrils?"

Hmmmm - sniff. "Why George, this bonbon has the texture of a kangaroo turd and the bouquet of my Aunt Fanny. Not bad! Who's the chef?"

"Oh, it's just a little something cooked up by Dick and the boys down at The Project For the New American Cuisine. Do you think the mugs will fall for it?"

"Mate, once the punters get an eyeful of Krusty O'Reilly with his face full of this offal, they'll be fighting at the drive-thru like vultures in a drought! By the way, what do you think of my bio-diesel project?"

"Rupe, the extraction of volatile esters from the corpses of dead Arabs is a masterstroke. Given their prodigious abilities in the sack, we just might have the beginnings of a sustainable industry here ..."

"Well, I did express a desire for oil at $20 per barrel and you know how it is when I set my mind to something......"

(Camera pans across to a window, where a drilling rig can be seen threshing uselessly on the White House lawn ...)

A well-researched book on this very important subject is:
GUARDIANS OF POWER by David Edwards and David Cromwell(2006)
John Pilger comments on the cover: "The most important book about journalism I can remember"

Not related totally to this OLO, but it does try to give credit to journalists getting their word through despite war-related media suppression

Lat week’s Guardian in the Weekly Review section by Mark Lattimer, had the centre of his main page revealing what can only be a pictorial from a copy of a painting of the boy Jesus, surrounded by an ethereal glow with an adult male and female each side of him, also in Holy representation.

What made the pictorial even more breathtaking is that the foreground reveals the heads and shoulders of devoted looking Christian Arabs moving into the Church.

The major headline simply expresses the phrase MASS EXODUS - the accompanying italics intimating the following .........”as it is believed that half of Iraq’s Christians have now fled, why haven’t coalition forces done more to protect them?”

It could be suggested that Mark Lattimer and crew had gone to the trouble of showing the magnificient painting to reveal a truth that most academically trained journalists understand but not the general public.

From one who during retirement has spent years studying the philosophy of Western history, he becomes more and more shocked how much of what can be revealed as true Christian history has been left out because it is not the way the Church and the accompanying Christian governments want the Christian story to be told.

Seeing that so many of our OLO appear so learned, probably much more than myself with an early small school upbringing, would like comments regarding the following suggestions?

The boy Jesus revealed in the pictorial is very much like the story of the boy Jesus revealed to us by our mothers, myself having had a mother whose own mother was Irish and her father an Australian born German.

Bushbred Part Two

Therefore it was reasonably easy to believe later when studying historical philosophy that the suggestion that the boy Jesus with his so-called intellectual brightness could have been naturally gifted like the young Socrates.

Certainly the Bible does indicate the boy Jesus as eager to mix among learned people, as well as reporting that Jesus spent time in Egypt with his family. Accordingly, the Biblical history does fit in with a suggestion from some academics, that the young Jesus could have attended the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt, particularly as history books do indicate that more than half the pupils of the Great Library, which had mostly Greek tutors, were Jews.

3. It is so interesting that the Sermon on the Mount without the accompanying spiritual content could have easily come from Socratic or even Platonic folklore.

One could also dare to suggest, that journalists like Lattimer desperately wanted to reveal in their reports that certain Christian groups have long been unaccepted and indeed been left to suffer even more by our Christian churches and our governments because they have stayed too friendly with the Arabs.

Indeed, from acadamics there is much evidence to support the historical fact that the Arabic type Christians could be the true Christians rather than the Latinised believers. The Coptic-style Christians, as they also called, are not accepted because they are not all forced to believe in the Holy Trinity, which after all was only finally made officially spiritual by the Roman Emperor Constantine when he presided over the Council of Nicaea in the early 3rd Century AD, when much of the Christian Church by then had become Romanised or Latinised.

Feel sure that Lattimer was attempting to get the true message through about the Iraqi Christians with his pictorial of the Boy Jesus. It is also felt strongly that because the article only mostly deals with the effects that the attack on Iraq has brought on Iraqi Christians, the use of the pictorial with its extra suggestive historical features must be seen as a tribute to the article editors