Sanitizing Dubya's War

This from the Gadflyer via AlterNet Peek reminded me of the horribly vivid television reporting of the Viet Nam conflict, mess, imbroglio, tragedy. Night, after night, after night, the television news would, in living color, provide images of the American wounded and dead; images of the battles where good men died because of the mendacity of the politicians and generals. Not so today.

Don't Look Now Paul Waldman (1:21PM) link

Lots of people are talking about an L.A. Times piece over the weekend in which they looked into the rather bloodless presentation of the Iraq war in major newspapers:

To measure how American publications have depicted the war in pictures, The 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 Fallouja 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.What few people seem to realize is that this is nothing new. A while back, I wrote a column about this topic. A friend of mine, Jessica Fishman, is perhaps the country's foremost expert on the presentation, or lack thereof, of dead bodies in newspaper photos. Studies that she has done (see here for an example) of decades' worth of newspapers have come to the following conclusions, oversimplified here for your edification:

The dead bodies of foreigners are OK to show, but the dead bodies of Americans are not OK to show (dead Americans are more likely to be shown as they were when they were alive, like in a wedding photo).

Foreigners can be shown committing acts of violence, but Americans can not. In fact, American soldiers are more likely to be shown giving out candy or chatting with kids than doing what soldiers are trained to do, which is blow things up and kill people.You may remember the time, in the early days of the war, when Iraqi television broadcast pictures of bodies of a few American soldiers. Our own TV anchors reacted as though the pictures were the most horrific thing anyone could imagine - they prattled on about how they wouldn't show them because they were too "disturbing." An explosion in downtown Bagdhad, photographed from a mile away, now that's super-kewl and we'll run that a few times an hour.

Anyhow, the L.A. Times deserves kudos for doing this analysis, but what they found is nothing new.