by Ron Kaufman
"Nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens.
I don't."
-- President George W. Bush, April 13, 2004
"Change the channel."
-- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of civilians
killed by coalition troops. [NYT April 12, 2004]
The horrors of war are not shown on television. Like a child's toy, television coverage of war is safe and simplistic. Television does not want to hurt or offend or -- heaven forbid -- portray grim realities. War on TV fits neatly into little segments of narrated video with short 8-second soundbites and cool 3-D graphics. A television war is fought between commercials.
World War I (1914-1918) was called "The Great War" or "The War To End All Wars" because of its brutality and scope. The lethality of the armaments and the use of weapons of mass destruction such as mustard gas during World War I made it unlike any other war in history. At that time, people believed that the human race would tire of war after witnessing such destruction. As a result of World War I, some estimate that nearly 18 million people died (half on the battlefield and half civilian casualties). The moniker "The War To End All Wars" will never be suggested again as long as television is the primary means through which information is transmitted.
Unfortunately,
the human race did not learn the lessons of World War I and the cycle of violence
continues to this day. The issue of whether the United States of America should
have invaded the nation of Iraq in March 2003 will occupy political scientists
and historians for centuries (even now, one could still debate whether Hannibal's
invasion of Rome in 218 BC spread the Carthaginian armies too thin and eventually
lead to its demise). At issue, will always be the faulty intelligence President
George W. Bush used to justify the invasion -- Iraq was said to possess chemical
and nuclear weapons that could threaten the United States, however, nothing
was ever found. Yet, beyond the Bush administration's false claims, was the
overarching philosophy within the government and media that war and
not diplomacy was the proper course. Television plays a huge
role in the promotion and continuation of this war.
In America,
the Iraq War is literally a game. Building off their successful F/A-18
Korea Gold combat flight simulator, Graphsim
Entertainment has developed the F/A-18 Operation Iraqi Freedom video game.
"Jump through your television directly into the cockpit of the Navy/Marine
workhorse fighting machine-the F/A-18 Hornet," says the company's promotional
material. "Now you can fly the most prolific carrier-based aircraft in
the Coalition arsenal. Load up with precision guided munitions and bring the
forces of freedom to bear on the Iraqi regime of terror." The game features
"Coalition and enemy fighter aircraft of many types as well as bombers,
helicopters, tanks, trucks, SAM missile systems and more. Load them down with
the latest in high-tech weaponry and send them into the fray."
How can war be wholesome family entertainment?
Throughout the first 20 months of the Iraq War, nearly 1,200 U.S. soldiers were killed and, according to one study, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians died directly or indirectly from the war. The number of U.S. wounded is staggering at more than 4,500. Websites such as Iraq Coalition Casualties and Iraq Body Count keep track of the numbers which are almost inconceivable.
Numbers, though significant, don't really mean anything unless they are put into context. Television is the perfect medium to portray the impact of war. People fight wars and people die in wars. People's bodies and minds are injured in wars. Families grieve in wars and entire cultures can be permanently changed or totally destroyed. Television can transmit crystal clear sound and video that could make a dramatic impact on all our perceptions of war.
Television
could choose to raise the debate of war versus peace. Television could debate
the intricate decisions that lead to warring nations. Humans are warlike creatures
and thousands of years of human history have seen thousands of wars. "Why
do we kill each other?" is not an easy question to answer and involves
deep discussion about human nature and an investigation into human history.
Television, however, shows none of this. Television is not the domain of truth,
but of beer commercials, soap operas and sit-coms.
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Carl Bernstein has routinely criticized today's media as "a triumph of idiot culture" because the purpose of television news is to entertain and not to inform. "Look at the war coverage," Bernstein told an audience at the University of Texas at Austin (Nov. 12, 2004). "How much have you seen about what's really going on on the battlegrounds?"
Bernstein contends that the public is not getting the truth about the war in Iraq. "Deal with facts first, then have the debate," he said. "Iraq is a misrepresentation of facts . . . I believe it's the role of journalists to challenge people and not amuse them."
"We as a country are wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent,
with apparently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information.
Our mass media reflect this. Unless we get up off our fat surpluses and
recognize that television in the main is now used to distract, delude,
amuse and insulate us, television and those who finance it as well as
those who look at it and those who work at it, are going to see a totally
different picture." |
Bernstein is not alone in his assessment.
ABC News anchor Ted Koppel told the Hollywood Radio & Television Society in April 2004 that TV news is doing a horrible job at informing the public. Koppel echoed respected CBS News anchor Edward R. Murrow's 1958 prediction that TV news would be used to "distort, delude, amuse and insulate us." Koppel said the fusion of entertainment and news has created an environment where real journalism no longer has a place.
"It seems likely to me," said Koppel, "that when we begin processing news for the young and treating news as an off-shoot of the entertainment business, when we began taking our journalism more lightly, people began taking us less seriously . . . I have no problem whatsoever with entertainers and comedians pretending to be journalists; my problem is with journalists pretending to be entertainers."
Koppel
said that part of the problem are reporters who “are more interested in
reporting what the government wants them to report.” He said “Patriotism
is not conveyed by wearing a flag pin on your lapel. Patriotism is conveyed
by doing your job the best you can. And if you’re only interested in reporting
the government’s line, you’re better off reporting in Iran or North
Korea where I promise you you’ll have no problem finding out what the
government wants you to say.”
Canadian broadcaster Robert MacNeil has noted that the television industry has changed and is becoming less and less accommodating to investigative journalism. In a 2002 speech, he said television "is our principal distraction, entertainment, escape and source of advertising. The latter are all activities which not only permit, but require some shading of reality, if not outright fiction. I think those values have helped to degrade the democratic process and have fed cynicism and lower participation. More than ever, they need the scrutiny of journalism that is not part of the same machine bound by the same commercial imperatives."
He said Koppel's Nightline program is "ultimately doomed by the logic that there is no place for a serious program that garners about five million viewers a night." TV news is more about making money and "squeezing commercial time" into as many places as possible.
Gone from the TV industry are people like Fred Friendly, the CBS News president who quit in 1966 after the network chose to broadcast a rerun of I Love Lucy rather than a Senate hearing on the Vietnam War. On November 11, 2004 a CBS News producer broke into the crime drama CSI: New York with breaking news of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The producer was fired the next week because of the interruption. That producer committed two major TV sins: never interrupt fiction with reality and never show dead people on the TV screen.
War is made
entertaining for audiences because the real war is not shown. A Project
for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) report in March 2003 noted that U.S.
TV networks never showed any people getting hurt during the beginning of the
Iraq War. Although 21% of the action on TV news involved the firing of weapons,
10% of that showed non-human impact (impact on a building or vehicle), 11% just
showed a weapon firing with no result filmed, and zero percent showed human
impact, according to the PEJ study (see the essay War
TV: American Television's Feel-Good Conflict for more).
The media watchgroup Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) noted that war coverage is big on drama and low on reality. "Despite daily reports about the 'showdown' with Iraq," states the group, "Americans hear very little from mainstream media about the most basic fact of war: People will be killed and civilian infrastructure will be destroyed, with devastating consequences for public health long after the fighting stops."
A FAIR investigation of news coverage showed that "none of the three major television networks' nightly national newscasts-- ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News or NBC Nightly News-- have examined in detail what long-term impact war will have on humanitarian conditions in Iraq. They've also downplayed the immediate civilian deaths that will be caused by a U.S. attack." The networks did not report on a Human Rights Watch briefing-paper warning of a "humanitarian disaster" in Iraq; they did not mention a United Nations report about lack of food, potable water and homeless problems in Iraq; and the media says nothing about lack of adequate medical treatment due to the war.
FAIR does
note that the only program to present any news regarding the human cost of war
is ABC's Nightline. However, the broadcast also minimized the impact
of civilian deaths by reporting that Iraqi civilians are not targeted directly
by the U.S. military, but become what is called "collateral damage."
"Unfortunately, Nightline is not alone among major media outlets in asserting that civilian deaths can be considered accidental even if the Pentagon predicts them ahead of time and factors them into its battle plans;" states FAIR. "it's a conceit that's widespread in the mainstream press."
War is OK. War is accepted. War, strangely enough, is even supported by some media pundits. Outspoken Fox News Channel commentator Bill O'Reilly said in June 2004 that with regard to Iraqis, the U.S. should just "bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain't going to work."
On American television, the war in Iraq has become a sort of weird vortex between the pro-war-we-can-do-no-wrong belief structure and honest objective journalism. It seems that TV networks cannot make up their minds whether to blindly support the war under a veil of patriotism or report the problems and difficulties that naturally rides along with the instigation of armed conflict. The bottom line, though, is that TV needs to portray any war-related issues as both quick and simple. As portrayed on TV news, war is really nothing more than another story stuffed between the traffic report and the sports update.
Thane Peterson wrote in Business Week Online that "The trouble with the blow-by-blow TV coverage is that the war is quickly getting sucked into the greedy maw of world popular culture. It's as if this deadly serious conflict in which real people are being killed and maimed were just another episode of reality TV -- Survivor: Iraq. Throughout the weekend, pixelly, digital footage from the 'embedded' correspondents at the front was interspersed with regularly scheduled broadcasts of golf and basketball tournaments and NASCAR racing. It was all so surreal."
In the middle of continuous fighting throughout Iraq with more than 300 U.S. Marines wounded in less than a week, CNN's top stories for November 17, 2004 were:
The top stories that day in America did not include that another suicide bomber killed 15 people in Falluja, Iraq or that a cameraman got video of a U.S. Marine allegedly shooting an unarmed Iraqi man in the head inside a mosque. The top story in most major news papers, radio and TV was the controversy surrounding the Monday Night Football pregame promo of a naked blonde actress jumping into the arms of Philadelphia Eagles receiver Terrell Owens.
In contrast, Arab TV-network Al-Jazeera's top stories that same day were:
The U.S. media keeps Americans shielded from the truth about war. A study performed by Johns Hopkins University, Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and Columbia University gives compelling evidence that around 100,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. [The Lancet, November 13, 2004] The study concluded that the risk of death in Iraq was 95% higher in the 17-month period after the invasion than during the 14-month period prior to the U.S. attack.
"Making conservative assumptions," states the report, "we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. We have shown that collection of public-health information is possible even during periods of extreme violence. Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce noncombatant deaths from air strikes."
In a commentary on the study, The Lancet editor Richard Horton warns that to overlook the findings will invite more death and destruction. He said the Coalition forces should change their military tactics in order protect the civilian population of Iraq and ensure a successful transition to democratic self-rule. "For the sake of a country in crisis and for a people under daily threat of violence," concludes Horton, "the evidence that we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts."
The Lancet report was virtually ignored by TV news.
In an April 2004 interview with Ahmed Al Sheik, editor-in-chief of Al-Jazeera, CNN talking head Daryn Kagan dismisses and twists the Arab cable news network's use of images of war:
AL SHEIK: What we have been showing represents what takes place on the ground. We have been showing bodies of people who were killed, bodies and the graveyards where people are burying them down. We have been showing those who were injured in hospital in their beds, where their hands and legged were cuffed.
That's what we've been showing. And we never said before that the Americans killed those people intentionally. What we showed are pictures of U.S. helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter jets bombing Fallujah.
KAGAN: Isn't the story, though, bigger than just the simple numbers, with all due respect to the Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives -- the story bigger than just the numbers of people who were killed or the fact that they might have been killed by the U.S. military, that the insurgents, the people trying to cause problems within Fallujah, are mixing in among the civilians, making it actually possibly that even more civilians would be killed, that the story is what the Iraqi insurgents are doing, in addition to what is the response from the U.S. military?
Kagan's revealing statement shows that American media outlets will routinely attempt to minimize the civilian war causalities. Her question to Al Sheik shows that TV news will try and put blame on "Iraqi insurgents" rather than the U.S. military. Al Sheik's answer shows the stark dichotomy between the U.S. perspective and that of the Arab world:
AL SHEIK: Well, you call them Iraqi insurgents. We call them here resistance fighters . . . What do we expect the Iraqi young people to do, to sit idle there, not to carry a gun and to fight? They believe that the Americans are occupying their country.
Television will simply not show casualties of war. During the initial invasion in 2003, Al-Jazeera obtained video of dead American soldiers lying on a road after their convoy was attacked. American TV news outlets unanimously agreed not to show the footage. MSNBC anchor John Siegenthaler said:"They are horrifying pictures and we are not showing them on MSNBC." ABC News president David Westin said:"I didn't see the showing of actual bodies as necessary or newsworthy." Upon being asked whether Fox News will show civilian casualties after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, anchor Brit Hume replied: "We know we're at war. The fact that some people are dying, is that really news? And is it news to be treated in a semi-straight-faced way? I think not."
The reasons
behind the media's blackout of hurtful or painful images goes beyond the desire
to make the news "watchable." Surely, disturbing images and video
will make someone turn off the TV -- not keep watching. There are two other
reasons, however, that go to the core of the journalists themselves.
First, is the mainstream media's almost total reliance on "official sources" for their reports. Under the guise of "objectivity," journalists always provide sources for their stories. These sources can be anyone, but the journalist must use information and quotes from people other than themselves. This use of "official sources" adds an air of legitimacy to news gathering. However, it also limits what can be reported and what stories can be pushed into the mainstream.
"To remove the controversy connected with story selection, professional journalism regards anything done by official sources -- for example, government officials and prominent public figures -- as the basis for legitimate news," explains Robert McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of eight books on media issues, in the book The Problem Of The Media. "The limitations of this reliance on official sources are self-evident. Those in political office . . . wield considerable power to set the news agenda by what they speak about and, just as important, what they keep quiet about."
McChesney
goes on to say that "journalists who raise issues no official source is
talking about are accused of unprofessional conduct and of attempting to introduce
bias into the news . . . this reliance on official sources may give the news
a conventional and mainstream feel, but it does not necessarily lead to a rigorous
examination of major issues."
In the case of the Iraq War, the military can choose to talk about some issues and remain silent about others. As General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, said at the beginning of the war: "We don't do body counts." In a way, the mainstream American media is handcuffed from pursuing news that deviates from the official government talking points. If no official source will "go on the record" regarding an issue, it may never have happened. The U.S. military will not provide information related to war's ugly impact on soldiers and innocents. As a result, the media will also shy away from providing body counts.
For example, during the November 2004 offensive in Falluja, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force reported that, in one week, 51 American soldiers were dead and around 425 wounded. The offensive resulted in an estimated 1,200 Iraqi insurgents were killed and, depending on the source, hundreds of civilians may have been injured or killed. Not one of the dead or seriously wounded was ever shown on U.S. TV news because of the graphic nature.
The second,
and more disturbing, reason for the news media's retreat from revealing the
true images of war is high amount of self-censorship among reporters. A survey
conducted by the Pew Research Center for
the People & the Press called "Self
Censorship: How Often and Why" shows that a majority of the polled
reporters (77%) said that stories they determined were "important but dull"
were avoided 77% of the time. This survey of 300 journalists also noted that
more than half (52%) of those who responded said "overly complex stories"
were usually ignored.
Specifically, television journalists said that complicated issues need to be avoided. "Three-quarters of national broadcast journalists (and nearly six-in-ten of their local counterparts) say newsworthy stories are at least sometimes ignored because they are regarded as too complicated for the average person," states the report (see graphic to the left).
Sadly, only 37% of national journalists and 35% of local journalists say their profession is successful in striking the balance between what the public wants to know and what it needs to know and according to the report, "majorities in both groups say the media does only a fair job at this crucial task."
Television news has been a dismal failure in its portrayal of the war in Iraq. In its effort to amuse and entertain, TV news "dumbs down" its coverage to something within the intellectual range of Oprah and a Looney Tunes cartoon. The sacrifices made by U.S. and other Coalition troops in the Iraq War is impressive, respectful and profound. The Iraqi casualties are depressing and unfortunate. It is the solemn duty of the media to respect these sacrifices and show the truth. The public has a right to see the truth. The American mainstream TV media -- MSNBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, CNN and PBS -- have all contributed to a conspiracy of silence in their coverage of war.
There can be no doubt, that if television showed the real human cost of war -- raw images of blood, pain, death and destruction -- this war would be over.
© 2004 by Ron Kaufman @ TurnOffYourTV.com
Illustrations by 19th Century Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe Posada.
