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Searing images can be signposts by Tim Rutten 
LA Times, 3 April 2004 Searing images can be signposts TIM RUTTEN This week's killing of four American paramilitary contractors by Iraqi insurgents and the subsequent desecration of their burned bodies by a mob in Fallouja has revealed fissures in the U.S. news media every bit as deep as those that now divide the country. At the bottom of that chasm are difficult questions not only about the public's interest and its right to know but also about subtle shifts in some news executives' attitudes toward the men and women of the armed forces. Newspaper and television newsrooms were roiled throughout the day Wednesday by debates over how to handle gruesome still and video images of Iraqi crowds beating, dragging and hanging the blackened bodies of the civilian security contractors. White House spokesman Scott McClellan - no doubt mindful of the public revulsion that greeted similar pictures of a dead American soldier's body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 - urged editors to "act responsibly in their coverage." Seldom have so many seemed as uncertain over just what that meant. The three cable news networks - CNN, Fox and MSNBC - initially declined to broadcast images of the bodies. By evening, CNN and two of the broadcast networks, CBS and ABC, elected to air certain of the images, accompanied by warnings and, in some cases, blurring. Fox, MSNBC and NBC chose to present only pictures of the dead men's burning vehicles, while their correspondents described the savagery that followed. "My feeling is that we can convey the horrors of this despicable act while being sensitive to our viewers," said Steve Capus, executive producer of the "NBC Nightly News." Bill Shine, Fox's vice president of production, said his network simply decided "it was too graphic to show." According to a survey conducted by Editor & Publisher's online edition, only seven of the country's 20 largest newspapers elected to put photos of the charred corpses on their front page. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Post and San Francisco Chronicle selected pictures of two bodies hanging from a Fallouja bridge. The Washington Post and USA Today decided to go with more graphic photos of Iraqis striking the bodies with their shoes, a now-familiar gesture of contempt in the Arab world. Some of the nation's other large papers, including the Los Angeles Times, chose a middle course - printing pictures of the burning vehicles on Page 1 and photos of the desecrated bodies on inside pages. On one level, this diversity of decisions is a fairly convincing rebuttal to those who claim an elite, overwhelmingly liberal national media invariably marches in lock step. In part, editors and producers were responding to what many believe is a growing public distaste for indecent, violent or prurient images. In part, there also was an unspoken recollection that dramatic - indeed, unforgettable - pictures from previous conflicts became signposts on the road to profound changes in public sentiment. Iraq is a highly politicized issue in this highly political year. Vietnam resonance Few Americans of a certain age ever will forget the chilling press photos that helped transform Vietnam from another Southeast Asian domino to the dark night of our national soul. We retain indelible images of Buddhist monks burning in the streets of Saigon, of naked Vietnamese children fleeing from a napalm inferno, of a police chief summarily executing a handcuffed Viet Cong fighter with a pistol shot to his head, of rows of flag-draped coffins coming off transport planes at Dover Air Force Base. "Support for the American effort in Vietnam declined after the Tet offensive in 1968, which also is when the media began saturation coverage of the war," said CNN political analyst William Schneider, a longtime scholar of public opinion. "It lead the evening news every night, Walter Cronkite began to talk about 'no light at the end of the tunnel,' and a majority of Americans began to say the war was a mistake." Similar things happened, though far more swiftly, during the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Public horror over the sight of 241 dead Marines being pulled from the rubble of their bombed Beirut barracks forced an end to the intervention in Lebanon under President Reagan. Even more horrific footage of the dead soldier being dragged down a Mogadishu street compelled President Clinton to pull U.S. troops out of chaotic Somalia. Schneider, however, points out that there is one critical difference between the public's attitude toward these three cases and Iraq: "You didn't have a 9/11 in Vietnam, Lebanon or Somalia and that makes all the difference. There is still majority support for the Iraq war - 56% - because we were, after all, attacked." The fact that Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the Sept. 11 atrocities matters not at all, Schneider believes, noting, "After 9/11, the sentiment was invade somebody, and public support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq remains strong." When editors and news executives engage issues of the sort they were compelled to decide Wednesday, an imprecise set of calculations is used to strike an inevitably imperfect and intuitive balance. One the one side are common decency, respect for the dead and their grieving survivors and a desire not to needlessly affront the sensibilities of viewers and readers. On the other scale is the public's interest in obtaining the information on which a free people rely to make informed decisions about their government's policies. The need for facts is never more acute and the news media's duty of witness never more urgent than when the issue is war and peace. It is possible, though, that some news executives' notion of where that balance should be struck has changed along with the composition of our armed forces. Vietnam was fought in large part by draftees. Today, the United States has a professional corps of commissioned and noncommissioned officers and ranks overwhelmingly filled with the sons and daughters of the working poor and lower middle class. The four men who died in Fallouja were something even newer, members of a growing force of domestic mercenaries, men and women lured out of the military by private security firms that pay salaries as high as $200,000 a year. Their employers hire them out to the U.S. government. The soldiers, Marines and Air Force personnel deployed in Iraq are there because they elected honorable military service. The contractors, like those who died Wednesday, are there for profit. When news executives and editors weigh the public's interest in knowing the gritty reality of this war, might their decision on how to strike that balance be different if those at risk were their own sons and daughters or those of their friends and associates? Wouldn't the weight of decision fall on the side of the fullest possible disclosure? Today, America's wars are waged by the poor and the professionals. There are unlikely to be any John Kerrys to emerge from the defeat and occupation of Iraq. |