Page 200 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

190 Chapter 8

Media reporting and framing in support of promised "precision attacks"
implies two things about the nature of American bombing: 1. that "insurgents"
and Iraqi civilians can largely be separated during bombing campaigns (hence
the promotion of the concept of "precision bombing"); and 2. as a logical result
of the use of "precision weapons," the US. has not, and is not killing large
numbers of civilians in its occupation of Iraq. Studies such as the Lancet reports,
however, have seriously questioned both assumptions, which is likely the main
reason why they were neglected in media coverage.
News outlets outside the American mainstream media focus more attention
on reporting stories highlighting civilian deaths in Iraq. Arab news stations like
A1 Jazeera show the effects of numerous bombing campaigns on the Iraqi people
and infrastructure, emphasizing bloody images of civilians killed in the Iraqi
conflict. Conversely, American mainstream media prefer to refrain from printing
the most bloody and gruesome images, assuming that Americans cannot handle
such bloody pictures, or that they are not interested in them in the first place.
This difference in reporting has become a major point of contention between A1
Jazeera and Western media outlets. Hafez Mirazi, Washington bureau chief of
A1 Jazeera, exemplifies A1 Jazeera's view on this issue well: "There is a feeling
in our newsroom that you need to be as realistic as possible and carry the images
of war and the effect that war has on people.. .if you are in a war, your popula-
tion shouldn't just eat their dinner and watch sanitized images on TV."~'
American reporters and editors call upon traditional notions of "objectiv-
ity," "professionalism," and "taste" in order to refrain from printing or airing the
bloody pictures. The objective of reporting, according to Howell Raines, Execu-
tive Editor of the New York Times, is "to try to capture the true nature of an
event, whether it's a disaster like the World Trade Center or war, but also do so
with restraint and an avoidance of the gratuitous use of images simply for shock
va~ue."~' This standard is generally adhered to in most reporting, although there
are some dissenters from within the system. Veteran American war reporter
Chris Hedges argues that media has a responsibility to show such gruesome im-
ages in order to fully educate the public about the brutality of war: "If we really
reported war as it is, people would be so disgusted and appalled they wouldn't
be able to watch. War is packaged and sanitized the same way the poisons of
tobacco or liquor are packaged and sanitized. We see enough of the titillation
and excitement to hold our interest, but we never actually see what wounds do to
bodies." The divorce of war from bloody images and graphic violence does a
great disservice to American understanding of the effects of the American occu-
pation of Iraq, which has steadily grown more deadly since the early days of the
invasion.
The problem with the Iraq war, Hedges explains, is that "We reveled in the
power of the weapons, and we were never shown what those weapons did so
that somehow the consequences of these machines of death were sanitized. That,
I think, is always dangerous."52 While Iraqis, human rights groups, and un-
embedded reporters consistently claim that civilians are being targeted and
killed in mass by American bombings, U.S. officials react in the negative, argu-
ing that those who are killed are, by and large, "insurgents." When admitting