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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
The media are finally showing the war in its full horror. What took them so long?
May 6, 2004 | Images of captured Iraqis being abused and humiliated ended the deadly month of April, which began with editors and producers grappling with how to handle images of the charred bodies of four U.S. private contractors killed in Fallujah. In between were haunting images of American kidnap victims, both civilian and military. Then on April 18, Americans saw their first glimpse of row after row of flag-draped coffins being flown home for burial, images the Bush administration had fought to keep under wraps.
As dispatches from Iraq grow grim, the casualty rate hits new highs and domestic support for the war drops, the debate over what news images of war are proper, tolerable or acceptable is becoming increasingly polarized. Even the announcement last week that ABC's "Nightline" would honor the dead soldiers in Iraq with a roll call sparked heated controversy. This division over imagery occurs amid a presidential election in which voters' perception of the war -- shaped by media accounts and presentations -- may prove pivotal.
April's unexpected chaos in Iraq may signal a shift toward bolder, grittier wartime press coverage. For an entire year before then, much of the mainstream American news media was dutiful, if not outright timid. There were still remnants of hesitation when the Abu Ghraib prison story broke last week, particularly in how major U.S. newspapers tentatively dealt with the disturbing images on their front pages. CBS's "60 Minutes II" unveiled the now-famous photos exclusively on Wednesday night, April 28, and by Friday morning they were widely available to the press. Network television newscasts and cable outlets broadcast the images. On Saturday, nearly 20 large American newspapers ran Page 1 articles about the story. But of those, only a handful, including the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, ran any photographs of the abused captives on A1.
The rest, including the New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald, Detroit News and Free Press, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Columbus Dispatch and Oakland Tribune, ran Page 1 stories about the controversial photos without actually publishing images alongside their stories. On Monday, USA Today, which does not publish on weekends, joined the list of newspapers whose editors decided that coverage of the abuse photos was worthy of the front-page but not the actual images themselves.
"They're clearly newsworthy, Page 1 photos," says Norman Solomon, author of "Target Iraq: What the Media Didn't Tell You." "The press, physiologically, is still embedded with the Pentagon, to a degree. I think there's a squeamishness among American editors because the [abuse] photographs run so counter to the image of the war that's been portrayed by a press -- a war of liberation."
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller insists that had nothing to do with why the paper opted to run the photos inside the paper. "By the time we had assurance that the pictures were genuine, they had been so widely distributed [on television] that we opted to run a couple of the pictures inside rather than front them," he explains. For Keller, the episode was just the latest example of how the country's deep partisan divide often projects itself onto news coverage. "People who think the war is wrong feel the coverage is sanitized. Those who feel the war is right are in favor of pictures of victory and 'Mission Accomplished.'"
Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, agrees: "Readers see the coverage through their own prism and ideological views of the war."
