Runnymede Institute

Friends and family of the late veteran journalist Marie Colvin are pouring out praise for this intrepid lady and Moshe Dayan manque with her trademark eyepatch. She was intelligent, reserved, polite, stood out in a crowd and was a nodding acquaintance to her neighbours in a little corner of hip west London. She died doing what she loved!

Conflicts require legend creation in the Robert Capa mould. The NATO backed terror group known as ‘The Free Syrian Army’ pulled this ‘own goal’, they’re a collection of the CIA’s Al Qaeda neerdowells and they don’t mind shooting in both directions for a bonus. The French are full in the fray as well, hot and heavy on a mission to reclaim colonial rights as they did to Indochina post WWII that brought us the Vietnam War.

A rocket attack in the Syrian city of Homs specifically targeted journalists, well-paid and endlessly lauded propagandists working on behalf of the new masters of the Near East. But who actually fired that shot? Were shots truly fired? Wringing sympathy out of the public is an old trick and so what, there are lots more avid suckers where they came from. Fantasists and adrenalin junkies aren’t supposed to live too long anyhow.

But when ingenious images that started and ended wars such as the Life cover of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York or the Spanish Civil War soldier falling backward to his death are outed as setups, mainstream won’t touch that ‘story’ with a bargepole. Tinkering with emotions is the greater part of journalism’s role and it is for this reason alone that all out ‘attack’ by supposed Assad forces smells of outrageous mendacity.

The News is manufactured, embellished and recycled ad nauseam yet most people still accept what they read, see and hear as the unvarnished truth, because of ‘the source’. Did anyone ever ask Ms. Colvin to raise that patch to make sure she didn’t still have a functioning eyeball below the prop? Of course not, it isn’t polite, only bad people would ask such a thing;so off with your humble scribblers impenetrably presumptuous head.

Feel the emotion? There are endless methods that media can use to fashion a story and make doubting it practically a mortal sin. We’re not speaking ill of the dead here because we believe Ms. Colvin is probably poolside at her Plastic Surgeon’s retreat spitting out daiquiris each time her death is mulled. If there truly is meat and a grain of truth, actual blame for her death rests with American compatriots, not Dr. Assad.

Sacré Bleu! I’m going to be verrry famous!

RMI predicts a plague of War biographies followed by floods of Syrian Charity appeals!