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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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April 08, 2003
Where are the bodies?
Something very important is missing from American broadcast coverage of the war in Iraq: dead bodies. Blog buddy Alex Frantz at Public Nuisance pointed out to me several days ago the lack of bodies on the news, and it's bugging me more each day. My confidence in the quality of our news coverage shrinks by the day
Don't get me wrong: I have no pleasure based desire to look at corpses. I don't get a boner from looking at dead bodies (although I AM a major Alice Cooper fan).
However, WE are at war. WE need to see just exactly what WE are actually doing. That's the only way a democracy works. The US government has killed tens of thousands of people on our behalf. I haven't heard very many specific numbers, but some talking head at Fox News suggested in the range of 50 - 80 thousand.
The various networks have hundreds of reporters embedded with our troops. They're spending tens of millions of dollars on every kind of technology to have theoretically the best, most comprehensive live reporting in the history of warfare.
So where are the bodies? That's the central fact in any war, yet we're not really seeing the carnage at all. It strikes me increasingly as surreal that we're having these many thousands of hours of intense, up close war coverage with almost no dead bodies being seen.
I do not recall seeing even one dead body from this war on any of the news networks, broadcast or cable. Now I have to think that there have been a few, just because it seems inconceivable that there wouldn't be ANY. I just know that I am not seeing them.
The only dead bodies I have seen were on Fox News. However, they were not even from this war. When word of the demise of Chemical Ali was breaking, they showed file footage supposedly of dead Kurds gassed on his orders years ago. The network had no trouble showing that- in prime time with no warning about the pictures being disturbing, or any such.
I have supported this war effort from the beginning. I think this war is a necessary evil. So far as I can tell, President Bush and the military have done a pretty extraordinary job in taking out bad guys while harming as few innocents as is humanly possible.
How do I know, though? Fox News tells me all is going great, and they have pictures of Iraqis thankful that we've come to lift the boots off their necks. That's great. They've got retired military guys with fancy screenwriters breaking down our smashing success into bite sized chunks for us to digest. They've got reporters out with the troops showing their progress.
Yet every minute I'm watching I am increasingly aware that we are absolutely NOT getting the whole story. They are shielding us carefully from the most central purpose and reality of war. What else are we being shielded from? And why?
It might upset Grandma to see true coverage of a war. Fine, then watch some damned Andy Griffith Show reruns. If you don't want to know what's really happening, then don't watch the news.
What would be the effect of showing the true blunt carnage of the war? Answer: don't know, don't care. Do it anyway. Maybe it will cause more people to turn against the war and the Bush administration when they see a field with hundreds of charred remains of Iraqi soldiers. Maybe seeing Americans blown apart by a suicide bomber at a checkpoint will stiffen our collective backbones, and increase support for being as tough as we have to be.
Put out the information, then let the people decide for themselves how they're going to interpret the facts. Fox News has the motto "We report. You decide." Well, then do the reporting so that we CAN decide for ourselves. You do your job so that we can do ours.
posted by Al at 4/08/2003 11:41:00 PM
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