[Vision2020] Censorship of Iraq War's Reality

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

All:


> "War kills men, women and children, and we would be remiss if we couldn't 
> in some way show that this is what happens in war," said Michele McNally, New 
> York Times director of photography. "It's our responsibility to bear witness 
> to these events." 
    
http://www.detnews.com/2005/nation/0505/22/natio-188811.htm

If we are going to claim the media in the USA is not providing the positive 
side of recent events in the war in Iraq, we should be open to the opposite 
claim, that in fact the media is not reporting fully on tragic and destructive 
events in Iraq.

With tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians killed due to US military 
action, how often have we seen actual photos of this loss of innocent Iraqi 
life?  Similarly, how often do we see photos of US soldiers killed in battle?  
The evidence is clear that in fact the media goes out of its way to avoid 
showing the full graphic deadly brutality involved in the US occupation of Iraq.  

In saying this I am not claiming that the media is doing enough to reveal the 
positive side of the US occupation.  Who now believes that a media mostly 
dominated by a profit driven approach to news even pretends without a smirk to be 
fair and unbiased and following some high moral principle of journalistic 
integrity not chained to the bottom line?

This debate on media bias in Iraq war coverage is astonishing insofar as it 
reveals the filtering and bias of both sides, Iraq war supporters and 
detractors.  Both sides can find evidence, or the lack of it, in the media, that the 
facts of the war in Iraq are not being presented fully and fairly, while both 
sides tend to filter out the reality of media content, or the lack of it, that 
does not reinforce their claim of a bias in the media either to support or 
undermine the war effort.

Read this excellent article which offers research on the number of photos of 
killed in action US soldiers in the US press:

http://www.detnews.com/2005/nation/0505/22/natio-188811.htm


> By contrast, a handful of conservative Internet commentators hammered the 
> Pulitzer Prize awarded to Associated Press in April. They said the wire 
> service's 20 winning photos for breaking news (including the shot of the 
> 24-year-old Babbitt) bucked up the insurgents and failed to show U.S. troops looking 
> heroic or helpful. The pictures, said a blog called Riding Sun, "portray the 
> American invasion and occupation of Iraq as an unmitigated disaster." 
> 
> To measure how American publications have depicted the war in pictures, the 
> Los Angeles Times reviewed six months of coverage from Iraq. The period from 
> Sept. 1 of last year until Feb. 28 of this year included the U.S. assault on 
> Fallujah and the escalating insurgent attacks before January's election. 
> 
> Despite the considerable bloodshed during that half-year, readers of the 
> Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, St. Louis 
> Post-Dispatch and Washington Post did not see a single picture of a dead 
> serviceman. The Seattle Times ran a photo three days before Christmas of the covered 
> body of a soldier killed in the mess hall bombing. Neither Time nor Newsweek, 
> the weekly newsmagazines, showed any U.S. battlefield dead during that time. 
> 
> The New York Times and Los Angeles Times printed the most shots of wounded 
> in the war zone during that time -- with 10 each, an average of one every 2 
> 1/2 weeks. The other six publications ran a total of 24 pictures of American 
> wounded. 
> 
> "I feel we still aren't seeing the kind of pictures we need to see to tell 
> the American people about this war and the costs of the war," said Steve 
> Stroud, deputy director of photography at the Los Angeles Times. 

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Vision2020 Post by Ted Moffett

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