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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The rest of the world is shown far more graphic war images than the U.S. media allows. Is the American public being insulated from the true horrors of the battlefield?
Apr 11, 2003 | The images of cheering Iraqis celebrating the demise of Saddam Hussein and dragging a demolished statue of the dictator through the streets of a liberated Baghdad will be linked forever with this war. It was the sort of defining moment that American media outlets have thirsted for, a feel-good picture of a coalition-led victory that could be played and replayed.
But the war is not yet over, and more fighting and attacks are certain, as painfully proved by Thursday's suicide bombing at a U.S. checkpoint in Baghdad. Once the thrill of the falling statue fades, news outlets will again be confronted with the grisly reality of grave injury and death -- among U.S. soldiers, Iraqi soldiers and civilians. But if the past three weeks are any guide, the American news media will not run them. And as a result, American news consumers will have little idea of what happens when the world's mightiest military power unleashes sustained attacks, albeit targeted ones, on an impoverished, despot-ruled nation, or what happens when that regime, fighting for its life, answers in kind.
To be sure, there have been deeply troubling pictures, but sometimes even they have a sentimental overlay. Perhaps the most famous battlefield photo to date, one that ran on newspaper front pages across the country, is a haunting shot of an Army doctor in full military gear squatting on the dirt and holding a young Iraqi girl in his arms just minutes after her mother had been killed in crossfire. The New York Times, Time magazine, CNN.com and others have, occasionally, run photos that featured more jarring looks at the injured and dead.
But those are exceptions. While newspapers, magazines and newscasts have overwhelmed us with stylized photographs of American soldiers either in battle, helping civilians, enjoying each other's camaraderie, or showing off the latest in war technology, the violence of war has often been treated as a danger zone, forbidden, an afterthought. Few argue that the U.S. press should follow lead of the Arab press -- Al-Jazeera in particular -- by singling out Iraqi civilian casualties and using gruesome footage to illustrate them. That, too, leads to a distorted view.
"I'm sure there's an enormous amount of carnage out there that's just not being shown," says Christopher Hanson, who reported on the first Gulf War for Hearst newspapers. "The coverage gives a false impression of what war is like for people in America, who have a tendency to be in denial about it."
Compared to its counterparts around the world, the American press tends to be more reluctant to use graphic images of bodily destruction and death that are the inevitable -- and intended -- byproduct of war. "It's seen as in poor taste, uncivil," says Hanson, who now teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. But in a culture that's becoming increasingly drenched in violence, it seems odd that war imagery is being treated more and more timidly. When a country goes to war, shouldn't Americans understand what's being done in their name?
"It's something we wrestle with every day," says Cecilia Bohand, foreign pictures editor for the New York Times. "We're not trying to run posters for the Army, which sometimes it does feel like when we're not running [images of] the other side. Some of us feel we should be a little more graphic."
The Times has, in some instances, pushed the envelope with more harrowing war images, such as a dead soldier or a dead child. And when that happens, readers react with anger. "We're flooded with letters," says Bohand. "Readers don't want to see it."
That can happen even with word portraits. National Public Radio got angry feedback from its audience after reporter Anne Garrels offered this vivid description for listeners after a U.S. cruise missile had just killed 14 Baghdad civilians: "The crowd brought out a severed hand and were shaking it ... basically saying, 'This is your liberation?'"
Others may be searching for gripping, Vietnam-style imagery, but the brief duration of the Iraq War makes it difficult to produce such pictures, says Doug Sehres, director of photography at the San Antonio Express-News. "We started to see some pretty intense photos come out of the battle for the port city of Umm Qasr. But that battle lasted several days compared to several years for the war in Vietnam. So there was a relatively small opportunity to take the type of pictures we're accustomed to seeing in warfare."
Still, there's an obvious trend among the war images being printed and broadcast in the American press, says Dennis Dunleavy, a professor of photojournalism at San Jose State University in California who has closely tracked the images of this war. He sees the images falling into three distinct categories:
1. Technology: "It's our power against the rest of the world and these images reflect that. Tanks, soldiers, shots from aircraft carriers, night-vision pictures. That's all about technology."
2. Victims: "But not casualties. It's images of refugees, displaced people squatting on the ground while soldiers stand above them. The dominant interest is the coalition troops against a background of helping the homeless or disenfranchised."
3. Soldiers: "Lots of clear pictures of soldiers giving directions, on the move. They're technically beautiful photographs and amazingly well shot for being in a war zone." (Pictures of injured American soldiers taken by embedded photographers are embargoed for 72 hours, which is one reason so few have appeared in newspapers; editors are not interested in running three-day-old photographs.)
But overall, says Dunleavy, "there's a sterile quality to the photographs. They're technically clean, but there's not a lot of conflict or intensity to them. I am seeing images in newspapers and magazines, but I'm not confident that they're really telling the whole story."
Newsweek's current issue is Exhibit A. Including the cover photo of rescued prisoner of war Jessica Lynch, the magazine runs 27 war-related photographs. Of those, 21 are of coalition soldiers in action (storming a building, rescuing Lynch, being kissed by a local Iraqi), or relaxing (swimming in a river, biding time, washing their hair). The remaining handful of snapshots include a charred Iraqi airplane and just a glimpse of a single wounded Iraqi. Newsweek's message is clear: The war is about American soldiers, not the Iraqi people.
The New Yorker, which ran just a single war snapshot this week -- a bloodied man reaching out to comfort a bandaged friend inside a Baghdad hospital -- did more to capture the consequences of war than Newsweek did with more than two dozen shots.
