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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Fri. 05/14/04 05:58:49 PM
   
   

Abu Ghraib and Nicholas Berg

Mainstream media's double double standard.

First, Diana West writes at TownHall, May 10:

Forgive me, but the head reels. A prison scandal in Iraq — already investigated, already in repair, but only recently and sensationally publicized — is now our nation's destiny, not to mention our national character. City on the Hill? Abu Ghraib. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Abu Ghraib. Yorktown, Gettysburg, San Juan Hill, Verdun, Midway, Hamburger Hill, Baghdad? Abu Ghraib. Mark Twain, Mickey Mouse, the Salk vaccine and bubble gum? Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib.
Why? Because Abu Ghraib is, more than anything else, the fulfillment of the media dream, the Vietnam they think they never had (or had a very long time ago), the aberration to obsess about, the disgrace to exult in and the opportunity — and this is key — to shift the political landscape. That is why 30-some instances of abuse at Abu Ghraib, which range from acts resembling extreme fraternity hazing to actual sexual assault, have sucked all the oxygen from the conflict's urgent questions of life and death, truth and falsehood, and civilization and barbarism....
Just as the media stampede to depict the U.S. military as a bunch of war criminals came sweeping by, a posse of good guys in white hats — Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — stood up to say it wasn't so. That is, it wasn't so in Vietnam, they said with great seriousness at a remarkable Washington press conference (which the Associated Press, incidentally, failed even to report), directly contradicting everything John Kerry has maintained since jump-starting his public career with tales of unproven wartime atrocities in 1971. "It is a fact that in the entire Vietnam War we did not lose one major battle," said Robert Elder, a member of this organization of sailors who served with Mr. Kerry and who believe he is unfit for the presidency. "We lost the war at home," Mr. Elder continued, "and at home John Kerry was the field general."
Strange that a man who once marshaled the forces of the Vietnam antiwar movement to transform, symbolically, the American soldier from good guy to baby-killer would vie for the presidency at a time when the still inchoate forces of the Iraq antiwar movement seek a poster boy, an atrocity, a way to pull the plug. That slander long ago, amplified by a willing media, eroded support for the Vietnam War, leading to our unconscionable abandonment of the South Vietnamese people in 1975. No wonder the rush to tar our armed forces as "torturers" today has that sick-making '70s ring. Abu Ghraib, however, doesn't have to be a turning point — unless we let them make it one.

Also, Jeff Jacoby writes a scorching column at The Boston Globe, May 13:

.... Poor Nick Berg. The anybody-but-Bush crowd isn't going to rush to publicize his terrible fate with anything like the zeal it brought to the abused prisoners story. CBS and The New Yorker couldn't resist the temptation to shove the Abu Ghraib photos into the public domain — and the rest of the media then made sure the world saw them over and over and over. But when it comes to video and stills of Al Qaeda murderers severing Berg's head with a knife and brandishing it in triumph for the camera, the Fourth Estate is suddenly squeamish.
As I write on Wednesday afternoon, the CBS News website continues to offer a complete "photo essay" of naked Iraqi men being humiliated by Americans in a variety of poses. But the video of Berg's beheading, CBS says, "is too gruesome to show." No other network and no newspaper that I have seen shows the gory pictures, either.
What exactly is the governing rule here? That incendiary images sure to enrage our enemies and get more Americans killed should be published while images that show the world just how evil those enemies really are should be suppressed? Offensive and shocking pictures that undermine the war effort should be played up but offensive and shocking pictures that remind us why we're at war in the first place shouldn't get played at all?
Yes, Virginia, there really is a gaping media double standard. News organizations will shield your tender eyes from the sight of a Berg or a Daniel Pearl being decapitated, or of Sept. 11 victims jumping to their deaths, or of the mangled bodies on the USS Cole, or of Fallujans joyfully mutilating the remains of four lynched US civilians. But they will make sure you don't miss the odious behavior of Americans or American allies, no matter how atypical that misbehavior may be or how determined the US military is to uproot and punish it.
We are at war with a vicious enemy, and propaganda in wartime is a weapon whose consequences can be deadly. Nick Berg lost his life because the Abu Ghraib pictures were turned into a worldwide media event. Yes, those who did so were sheltered by the First Amendment. That makes what they did not better but worse.

One paragraph is worth another look:

What exactly is the governing rule here? That incendiary images sure to enrage our enemies and get more Americans killed should be published while images that show the world just how evil those enemies really are should be suppressed? Offensive and shocking pictures that undermine the war effort should be played up but offensive and shocking pictures that remind us why we're at war in the first place shouldn't get played at all?

Print that out in big letters and hang it on the wall.

All this brings to mind some perceptive words of David Warren: The media have been discovered to be an enemy, pure and simple....

Commit that little sentence fragment to memory.

P.S. See Too Tender for All but Our Own Evil.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 05/14/04 05:58:49 PM
Categorized as Media.

   

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