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May 16, 2004
News Judgment Old and News Judgment New: American Nicholas Berg Beheaded.The argument surfaced last week: the gatekeepers in Big Media are mistaken--clueless, biased, disconnected--for filtering out the full horror of the Berg beheading. They haven't showed the photos or the video of the act itself. But the full horror is available on the Web, and hit meters suggest that some people are ready to see it. But will they see it on television?[Senator] Inhofe said the photographs of U.S. soldiers mistreating hooded, naked prisoners should be accompanied by photos of mass graves and the executions of prisoners under Saddam— as reported by CNN, May 12. Call it a test of news judgment. Should the full graphic horror of the Nicholas Berg beheading be shown on national television, and documented by photographs in the newspaper? So far the answer from major gatekeepers is no. But I’m not entirely certain that will hold through the week. Some think it shouldn’t. Led by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, perhaps the most “watched” weblog in these matters; by Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, who frequently departs from journalistic orthodoxy; and by others you can read about in this post, the argument has been made: editors and other gatekeepers in Big Media are mistaken—and proving themselves clueless, biased, disconnected or at least inconsistent—by not allowing, through the front page and newscast filter, the true gruesomeness and politicized horror of the Nick Berg killing. They aren’t showing us everything: the knife, the throat, the screams, the struggle, and the head held up for the camera. But the sickening photos from Abu Grahib keep showing up, and other developments in the ongoing abuse scandal are considered big news. Thus, Reynolds (go here and here) writes: “the big media leaders seem almost desperate to keep the story on Abu Ghraib, even to the point of running already discredited fake porn photos purporting to be from Iraq.” (See Dan Kennedy on that fiasco.) Fake porn aside, that sort of charge isn’t new. What’s different is the kind of evidence submitted to the court of media opinion. The Net’s reactions—where, as Reynolds puts it, “users set the agenda”—are placed in live comparison to Big Media’s treatment of the Berg video, photos and story. News Judgment New (the Web user’s hunger to know, see, publicize and discuss) is set against News Judgment Old (the gatekeepers and their ideas about news, the public interest, and “taste.”) Judgment New shows up in the meta-news about popular search terms: On Friday, phrases like “nick berg video” and “nick berg beheading” and “beheading video” topped the Google charts, indicating where the interest was. Video of the actual beheading is, of course, available on the Web, after surfacing first on a site linked to Al Queda. (See this post from Wizbang and this list of sites from Backcountry Conservative.) The same video was not on network television; and it was not in the 24 hour news cycle on cable. Newspaper front pages have not featured photos of the act itself. “Our letters page today is filled with nothing but Berg-related letters, most of them demanding that the DMN show more photos of the Berg execution,” wrote Dreher at National Review’s weblog, The Corner. (The editorial page of the Dallas paper, where Dreher works, published a photo of one of the killers holding Berg’s severed head, but blacked out the actual head “out of respect for the dead man’s family and the sensitivities of our readers,” as he put it.) Andrew Sullivan agreed with the letter writers in Dallas: “My gut tells me that the Nick Berg video has had much more psychic impact in this country than the Abu Ghraib horrors.” He also said his traffic was way up, as it was on all political blogs, indicating sudden interest in the consequences of the Queda action: “People who have tuned the war out suddenly tuned the war in. They get it,” said Sullivan on Thursday (May 13). “Will the mainstream media?” The “getting it” that Sullivan had in mind is an act of judgment about an act of terror: the Berg video, what’s actually shown and said in it, and what it means for Americans are a far more urgent story than further images and details leaking out about prison abuse in Iraq. Normal sensitivity scales for violence and blood do not apply to a political murder and international crime such as this. We should look the Berg beheading full in the face; then we’ll know what we’re facing in the fight against terrorism. That’s the argument. On Friday (May 14) the search engine Lycos was reporting—as meta-news, if you will—the Web’s more user-driven agenda: As in previous horrific events — September 11th, the murder of Lycos is saying: You can read the trajectory of reader interest in the progression from “nick berg murder” to the video of it, even though news of the video and murder arrived as one story. It’s as if people let the news sink in, paused to register what beheading of an American, video-taped and broadcast… really means, and then said: Okay, now I want to see for myself. Show me, television set. Show me, newspaper. But there was no showing, so they went to the Web. It’s not a discovery that people absorb the news in stages like this. But it’s different when we can see it happening in real time, and “read” the shifts in demand and interest— because we have Web tools like search engines, links and lists. (And yet those tools have many flaws.) From an alternative source of news, the Web has evolved into an alternative source for news judgment. Here’s Jeff Jarvis, who describes himself as a recovering authoritarian (former Time Inc. editor who got awakened) on: who decides what’s news? His are populist terms: We can look at what people are talking about on weblogs. We can look at what people are searching for online (see this Google search for “Nick Berg”). We can see what people are linking to on Technorati (this takes you to the latest links on “Nick Berg”). We can look at the traffic on stories about an evil enemy killing one of our innocents versus stories about — to go to Page One of the NY Times today: stories about our “abuse” and even a story blaming us for the murder of our innocent. “The people have news judgment,” Jarvis wrote (May 14.) “And it beats the judgment of many an editor.” All this is partly an argument about the wisdom of the war in Iraq (Reynolds, Sullivan, Derher and Jarvis support it) and thus only partly about journalists and their news judgment. That’s not a fatal qualification. Partisans on an issue can know news when they see it, and can perhaps see some things about the issue better. But it is a complication in every argument we try to have about media “bias.” Meanwhile, Rich Maritt’s Seldom Sober was one of the blogs that found the video and “ran” it—or sections of it—for users to download. Blogger Marotti thus became a news provider for those who demanded the more graphic footage. Not only that; he reflected on what he was doing—and who he was attracting to his site. Here’s some of his open letter about it: The blogosphere (the community of those who write web logs) broke this story, not Big Media. The blogosphere continues to cover it while Big Media continues to largely ignore it. The blogosphere has the courage and integrity to show this video (or images from it) while Big Media cries “Offensive!” as they continue to show pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners piled on top of one another. Evan Coyne Maloney, another weblogger, put it concisely: “One day the media was telling us we had to see the pictures from Abu Ghraib so we could understand the horrors of war. But with Berg’s beheading, we’re told we can’t handle the truth.” As far as I know, this is the only justification editors and news executives have given for holding back the actual scenes of Berg’s beheading: too shocking, too disturbing, just too much for most viewers. But Maloney’s view might give some of them pause: One minute I was fretting about our treatment of Baathists, insurgents, and yes, probably innocents in an Iraqi prison. The next minute I found my head reflexively jerking from the screen as I saw life itself ripped from a living man, a man whose only offense was having the courage to step into a war zone and try to help rebuild a country. There’s nothing like watching a beheading to put things in perspective. And if you aren’t allowing that beheading to be watched by the big national audience, then aren’t you, in a sense, denying your viewers the very possibility of gaining perspective? More Maloney: Not that you could find any depictions of the horrific murder in the traditional media. Their airwaves were absent of Berg’s haunting screams. Unless you went digging online, you wouldn’t see the ghastly image of Berg’s severed head being held up like a trophy. The media that had—rightfully, in my opinion—showed us the ugly reality of Abu Ghraib prison refused to do the same with Berg’s murder. The ugly reality of Abu Ghraib. The ugly reality of Nick Berg’s execution. Maloney’s argument is that we need to see both to have perspective. The editors of the editorial page at the Dallas Morning News took a similar view: (The title of their editorial: “This is the Enemy: Vile image shows world why we fight.”) Presenting this photograph, which was taken from an al-Qaeda-affiliated Web site, is important because of the power of image to shape public opinion. Shocking photographs have driven the Abu Ghraib prison atrocity story, which has now become a national crisis of confidence in this nation’s civilian and military leadership, and the mission in Iraq. If we show you images of Abu Ghraib abuses, and of soldiers’ coffins at Dover Air Force base because we think you should know the truth about this war, then we should show you this image, too. It’s hard to argue with that. Except that many did argue over the last week that the press was showing too much from the prison abuse scandal. Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) drew headlines when he said Tuesday that he was “more outraged by the outrage” generated over the prison abuses. “I’m also outraged by the press and the politicians and the political agendas that are being served by this.” (Which prompted a reply by Timothy Noah in Slate: “Is the liberal outrage really worse than the torture?”) It is a fact of life that there are political implications in everything the news media does when handling a big national story— including the images that are shown and not shown to us. Writing in USA Today on May 11, the day the Berg video surfaced, Walter Shapiro speculated: “This atrocity is almost certain to inflame American public sentiment, and presumably will strengthen the position of those calling for an-eye-for-an-eye vengeance in Iraq.” But if the atrocity—a political murder, committed in the Middle East—might inflame and strengthen, so too might news coverage of that atrocity inflame this and strengthen that, depending on how it is handled. And this is what I mean by political implications in everything the press does. Of course we need to argue about those, and it would be helpful to everyone if journalists learned to take a larger part in such debates. But part of the reason they don’t, I think, is that discussion so easily slides from the political implications of news judgment to the political motivations that must, according to many critics (including many PressThink readers), lie behind those judgments. Not only are the motivations there, it is said, but they are easily divined. In a typical statement of this kind, Jonah Goldberg of National Review writes, “When shocking images might stir Americans to favor war, the Serious Journalists show great restraint. When those images have the opposite effect, the Ted Koppels let it fly.” Goldberg concluded: “CBS should be ashamed for running those photos.” (See also Mickey Kaus in Slate, who agrees, and Howard Kurtz, who doesn’t.) Goldberg was not for suppressing the news of the prison abuse by Iraq. Just the photos from Abu Ghraib. He gave these reasons: These pictures are so inflammatory, so offensive to Muslim and American sensibilities, whatever news value they have is far, far outweighed by the damage they are doing. “Context” — the supposed holy grail of responsible journalism — is lost in the hysteria and political grandstanding. He also said that “uproar from these pictures drowns out all other messages, explanations… Lost is the fact that in America torturers get punished, while in the Arab world they get promotions.” I draw your attention to a strange quality of arguments like this, equally in evidence on the Left and the Right; among supporters of the Iraq war who don’t trust the media, and critics of the war who don’t trust the media. In Jonah Goldberg’s view, there are victims of CBS’s shameful behavior. But the victims are not him and his well-informed readers at National Review, who aren’t about to let proportion and context be lost in this debate. So it must be other people’s reactions he has speculated and worried about. Other Americans, he said, will react to the photos but miss the context and lose all sense of proportion because the news media—their source and guide—fail to provide context, fail to maintain a sense of proportion. I think it’s strange to go around telling the news media what to show and not show, based on your predictions of how other people—apparently less capable of independent judgment—will react to the news. It’s strange, it’s intellectually hazardous (your predictions can be wrong, and thus your conclusions too) and it risks inflantalizing your fellow citizens. You shouldn’t do it, because if you keep doing it you will soon be talking about “the masses” and what they will swallow. Soon after that you will be talking about what the masses should be fed. I don’t trust any argument—left, right, middle, fringe—when it assumes that others (the big audience, the mass public, the voters overall) will react with less nuance, intelligence, or critical thought than the writer and the writer’s friends. To me it’s a warning sign: anti-democratic attitude here in evidence. I don’t think CBS should be ashamed for running the prison photos— at all. That was a classic case of what a free press is for. However, I do think CBS and the producers at 60 Minutes, or Ted Koppel and his producer, Tom Bettag, or some other broadcast forum could announce that—after careful consideration—they’re going to show the beheading, complete with warnings that it may make you sick. On that occasion, they would have to explain themselves, as the Dallas Morning News did, and that would be a good thing. Although I don’t make predictions, I think it’s at least possible it will happen. If so, it will be this week and someone will make the “absorbing the news in stages” argument. I also think the political implications in what Big Media does are often under-discussed by journalists and critics alike, while the political motivations of the gatekeepers are way over-drawn. (They’re easier to speculate about, they generate more outrage, and they appear to “explain” a lot.) And along with this I believe we should all grow up a little. Don’t be calling for self-censorship by Big Media today when you may be hoping for less of it tomorrow— because the images have changed, and the implications are now different. Be aware that if you want gatekeepers to let pass more of the news that helps your side, and less that helps “them,” then you aren’t really addressing the gatekeepers at all. In fact, you have surrendered the topic of news judgment to politics and its maneuvers. You’ve politicized it. Way, way underneath these debates I find a disturbing fact. Even the smartest people in the major news media—and this is especially so in television news—have not really determined for themselves or explained to us exactly what their role should be in the worldwide fight against terrorism. “Cover it responsibly and well” doesn’t begin to provide an answer. For it must have occurred to people high up in the network news divisions that the videotape of the beheading was made not only for Bush but for them, in their professional capacity. That is a fact they have to live with, and think about, whether or not they show us the gruesome act. We are a long, long way from coming to grips with the fact that political violence worldwide incorporates media coverage worldwide. Terrorism can be many things, but it is always an attempt at communication; and a free press in an open society “completes” the act. So it’s not true that Al Queda kidnapped and beheaded an American. Al Queda kidnapped and beheaded an American and videotaped it in order to shock and sicken us when we found out. It’s not easy to decide what to do with that if you run a news network. But there is no option not to decide. There may have been a time when news judgment and political judgment could be kept safely apart, but that was an era unlike our own. After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links… Kevin Aylward of Wizbang, one of the sites with workable links to the video, wrote PressThink with the numbers— about 1.4 million visits to his weblog in the last week. “I’m not sure what this means, but it does mean we are not talking about a small number of people,” he said. Andrew Sullivan presses the case: “… if we are in a propaganda war, as we are, we need to be as ruthless in publicizing the murders committed by our enemy as we are in exposing the abuses committed by our own.” And he calls for a “campaign” to get the Berg images out. Let’s start an internet campaign to insist that the major media - including the New Yorker, the networks, the major newsweeklies, and every major paper - run a picture of Zarqawi holding up Nick Berg’s severed head. It’s time to release the Pearl video and stills too. Enough with the double standards. The media were absolutely right to show the abuse photos. But they are only part of the story. It’s about time the media gave us all of it, however harrowing it is. Don’t miss Liz W. at Life is a Spectator Sport on televising the beheading: (May 18) No one needs to tell us that it happened. No one needs to plead for the victim, to describe his terror, his screams or the agony of his death. No one needs to tell us the perpetrators were evil and vile—they stand accused by their own actions. Most of all, no one is trying to cover up what occurred. So the reason for airing the video can’t be to make sure we know what the “other guys” did. We already know it in our bones, in our own flesh, in the revulsion and automatic wince we feel when we think about it. Highly recommended. Belmont Club (referencing this piece from ombudsman Michael Getler in the Washington Post) reasons it out: “Getler’s claim is really an assertion of the right to invoke outrage, disgust and hatred at a specific act and its perpetrators, and those who may have been indirectly responsible for it. By taking this logic to its limit, Sullivan claims the same right: to unleash a symmetrical set of set emotions at another group — and demonstrates the absurdity. For it must either be correct to publish both the Abu Ghraib and Berg photos or admit partisanship.” Jon Friedman of CBS Marketwatch (May 14): “Obviously, the networks didn’t show the decapitating of American citizen Nick Berg because its grotesque nature would appall the U.S. viewing audience. ‘It’s the most horrible thing I’ve seen in 34 years of working here,’ said Marcy McGinnis, CBS News senior vice president for news coverage. ‘It was far too graphic and repulsive,’ McGinnis said.” (Link via Lost Remote.) Aaron Brown of Newsnight on CNN (May 12): “To show a tape of the beheading is pornographic while not advancing the story at all. But we also get there is a risk that we are sanitizing too much sometimes, that taste can interfere with understanding; and, in that regard, we have no quarrel with what they are doing in Dallas tonight even as we will not show it.” (Transcript of Brown’s interview with Dallas Morning News editorial page editor Keven Willey.) Cable Newser comments on this post: “If I was MSNBC, and I wanted to demonstrate the power of cable news… …well, you can fill in the rest.” Editor of the Albany Times Union asks about the Berg video: “Is it time to adjust our standards of newsworthiness to reach a Web-savvy audience?” His answer: NO. Rex Smith, Web won’t lower our standards. Heart of Canada warns: “Once you see a film like that, it can affect you for the rest of your life. If you surf around the web, you’ll read people’s accounts of how they became physically ill, tormented, haunted, horrified, traumatized, and more by watching the murder.” Wizbang, Big Media Has Failed You…. Jeff Jarvis comments on this post: News judgment is political judgment. David Adesnik at OxBlog writes: If the leading newspapers and television networks responded exclusively to audience demands, domestic news would quickly displace almost all foreign coverage. And in time, entertainment, weather and sports would displace news about domestic politics. Newspaper editor Tom Mangan in comments here: Every day we wonder, “how low must we sink to sate an audience?” … and reality TV, commercial interests and the Internet table pounders keep saying they want us to sink lower — then turn around and attack us for sensationalism when we do. Doc Searls comments on this post: “First, take it from an old PR guy: the Berg beheading was not an act of war; it was an act of publicity. Second, stop and think of what that publicity was meant to do, and what it has the power to do regardless of its intentions. Hal Crowther puts it best: The best way to give a lie the force of truth is to soak it in innocent blood.” Journalist Dan Gillmor observes: “This is already a blood-soaked culture, where Hollywood routinely sells movies full of realistic, made-up gore. Maybe we’ve created a climate where the only thrill that can top movie violence is a genuine snuff film, like the one those foul criminals in Iraq sent out to the world. How many of those searches were done by people who, rather than wanting more truth, more information, were just hunting for the sick thrill of watching death for real?” Chicago Sun Times columnist Mark Steyn: “We always come back to that strong horse/weak horse thing. But the point to remember is that Osama bin Laden talked about who was seen as the strong horse: It’s a perception issue. America may be, technically, the strong horse but, thanks to its press and its political class, the administration is showing dangerous signs of climbing into the rear end of the weak-horse burlesque suit.” Tim Rutten, media columnist, Los Angeles Times: “There is no more insidious moral trap than the notion that immoral means can obtain a moral end. We have been told repeatedly since Sept. 11 that, if we fail to defeat Al Qaeda, a new dark age may descend. The photos from Abu Ghraib suggest it already has.” (May 15) My NYU colleague Susie Linfield in the May 2001 Boston Review (“Capture the moment: On the Uses and Misuses of photojournalism.”) Photojournalism shows us that human beings do things we would like to think are not human. It stretches our definition of humanity, though often in ways that grievously wound us. Can we look at the world and still love it? This is the question that photojournalism poses. Can we stare at what James Agee called “the cruel radiance of what is” without shielding our eyes? Can we drop the alibi of ignorance—the endless insistence that we did not know—and resist the seductive lures of solipsism, of denial, of dissociation? Can we acknowledge the reality of the world we have made, without forgetting that a different one is possible—and necessary? Belmont Club: News Coverage as a Weapon: “Yet the extension of warfare into the area of media coverage is fraught with great danger, in no small part because it subtly alters the definition of where the battlefield lies and who an enemy combatant is. One of the enduring strengths of Western democracy and of the US Constitution in particular is the delineation between legitimate dissent and enemy activity, a boundary which enables a democracy to continue functioning, albeit in an impaired state, even in wartime. But the changing balance between the political and military aspects of war means that this line will begin to blur as military activities cross over into the political. Already, the Pentagon is beginning to offer direct news from Iraq. It has also reorganized its command structure in Iraq to explicitly recognize the role of political warfare.” (May 17)
Posted by Jay Rosen at May 16, 2004 2:11 AM
Comments
A few thoughts: Consider two broad conceptions for what would make a press more democratic. One would be to make the press more receptive to what people want. The structure of broadcasting companies invites an interpretation of their implicit philosophy as the editorial staff makes decisions and viewers are free to switch channels if they don’t approve. Such an attitude might be consistent with democracy if the technology and access were democratised. But given that denizen access is limited, good production expensive, etc., we ought to have some mechanism for mollifying the anti-democratic nature of the current big presses. Would more press democracy mean a system whereby news decisions are made in part by the audience instead of by a more remote editorial judgment? A system whereby a viewer could influence more directly what he or she could see and hear? Given the numbers game and broadcast structure, any recommendation for what should be broadcast, really is a recommendation for what other people should see. Hence a lever for attempts at ideological influence. Hence, a magnet for PR specialists building Astroturf campaigns, as well as good old-fashioned public opinion. Would market sampling help to be more democratic, the way radio stations microtune pop music playlists to match listener interest? The lesson radio broadcasters have taken to heart is to have variety kept in strict control. More diversity of music means fewer listeners. Would the lesson be more ideological specialization for more democracy? The other (better) conception that comes to my mind is to serve the same kind of role that history departments at universities serve, to support a social memory. Since the press in some ways does give us the (clichéd) first writing of history, some care could be taken to elevate the standard of the living history lesson that the press provides. One principle that would arise, I think, is that if you are trying to present a history of some war, academic honesty requires that you proportion your detailed stories or anecdotes in rough proportion to your evidence of their representativeness. If your evidence says X invaded Y’s land, enslaving, marauding, etc. far out of proportion to any harm done by Y to X, you don’t spend equal time detailing X’s crimes and Y’s crimes, much less focus prominently on the details of Y’s crimes, even when, as history often has it, the victorious X has well-preserved and self-serving documentation and Y has its stories cast along with its bodies into the pit. Allowances, to be sure, can be made to show diversity in the historical record or instructive exceptions. Such an well-established moral principle could come to bear on press decisions to show graphic violence fits, even after we take into consideration that editors don’t have the hindsight and research time of historians and almost always have their own ideological pre-commitment for or against the righteousness of X’s cause. Could senior editors not think along the following lines? We have a taped beheading here. What does our current best evidence indicate, given all we know about the history of the US in wars, the history of Iraqis in wars, about wars generally, given all that our journalists on the ground are telling us, etc. about how common such acts are in the political circumstances? How much discussion and showing of the video would reinforce an overall picture that is accurate to the evidence we have? The usual things an editor should be thinking about. In the end, a lot of the decision hangs on how many general background facts are weighed in making the decision. For example, even the most cursory investigation of history will tell you that the press in country X that was invading country Y, have predominantly, one might say overwhelmingly, either supported such invasions or on rare occasion opposed such invasions on tactical grounds mainly, e.g. that the invasion is righteous but unlikely to succeed. You just don’t find historical examples of the _major_ press institutions of country X saying, “This invasion is immoral even if it succeeds.” In fact, they usually don't call it an invasion. It's liberation, a humanitarian mission. So, if you know this history, as an editor from the invading country speaking to the denizens of the invading country, do you weigh that into your decision, knowing that the vast majority of military aggression, i.e. terrorism, has been committed with the moral support of the invader’s press? Should you weigh evidence of your own likelihood to be able to view the situation as objectively as future historians? Sound, reasonable procedure that should be demanded of any historian, or would that be “politicizing”? Humans have a hard time seeing the most obvious facts when shielded by the asymmetry of their own perspective. But a thoughtful person can at least try. How about a simple thought experiment for editors? Write down a summary of what you think are the relevant circumstances as well as they are known. Take every reference to the US and to Iraq and switch them. Then ask, "What should an Iraqi broadcaster do with a videotape of an Iraqi civilian executed in such a way?" Posted by: Douglas Kutach at May 16, 2004 8:40 AM | Permalink This observation caught my eye enough to go back and read it again: "As far as I know, this is the only justification editors and news executives have for holding back the actual scenes of Berg's beheading: too shocking, too disturbing, just too much for most people." And, it seems to me, this is true. I have avoided the video because I have chosen to do so. But, because I look at a lot of sites, I stumbled on one that had the still of Berg's head being held up. I wish I hadn't seen it, but I have and it is the kind of image that is, indeed, "news" in all the ways an image can be news. It shows me something that I had never seen before (and hope to never see again), and it discloses to me acts that tell me no matter how much I think I can imagine something I really cannot. Now that I have seen it, it does put the Prison pictures in perspective. You see, even though the Prison pictures are "news" they are not, like the photos above, new. Instead, they map to similar images that the culture has been presenting to us for years. While the S&M props, the piles of naked men, the jail cells, and all the rest of the "information" seen in the photos may have been "news" in that the actions they showed were coming out of a prison in Iraq and featured American soldiers, it all had a bit of the previously seen on HBO, at the movies, in the magazines, or on a porn website near you. Even people who don't seek these kinds of images out have had them flow by in their peripheral cultural vision. In a very real sense, while we haven't seen these images before, we've seen them all before -- they just had better production values. In a sense, they are so common in the background of our culture that a lot of people just don't see them anymore -- this is, as I understand it , one of the "explanations" offer by the Boston Globe for how it came to print a picture that contained a doggy-style insertion shot: 'We just didn't see it.' S&M pictures and jokes and catchphrases and references have been commonplaces in our culture for sometime now. The beheading shot, on the other hand, is something not at all commonly seen in either the news or in the culture. I've no doubt that dramatic and fictional beheadings have been used in the movies whenever there is either a dramatic point to be made or a horror film moment to be had, but the level of saturation is far, far lower than S&M/Prison images. Add to that the grainy and gritty nature of the image itself and the knowledge that what you are seeing is not a fiction, and you come into a whole new universe of what is seen; you will see visual news that is new. And while the reaction of the vast, vast majority of Americans that see this video will not be hard to predict, the actual level of that reaction is still unknown. It is, for those of us who use this medium, always difficult to remember that we are still in a small minority. For all the searches and for all the downloads that have made such a sidestory this week, it still adds up to just a sliver of the population as a whole. If this video is rolled out on network television, any internal media arguments about the showing of it will be utterly beside the point. I can tell you from personal experience with just one still that while you think you are ready for it, you are not. That, however, is not an argument for not running it. And what has to cross the mind of someone making that decision is not only the "news value" but the political implications. For as the prison pictures stimulate, as we have been told numerous times, a reaction of "shock and disgust," so the pictures from the beheading also stimulate a reaction. My personal reaction, based on seeing only one still, was that it hardened my hate for the people that did it and the culture they came from. Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. Posted by: Gerard Van der Leun at May 16, 2004 8:52 AM | Permalink I completely agree with the decisions made to not show the full video. My primary reason is out of respect to Nick Berg himself. Just as I'm horrified by the mere existence of sites like the (active last I knew) rotten.com, and the video series Faces of Death, I consider it in equally bad taste to put before an audience someone's death. As the above comment pointed out, the search engine part of the equation only accounts for a fraction of the population, certainly. I don't think taking that as a cue that showing the video would be the "democratic" thing based on that. Based on the responses I've seen to both rotten.com and Faces of Death (both of which, like the Nick Berg video, I have intentionally avoided viewing) many, if not most, of those searchers thought it "cool" or what have you. I don't like the idea of spreading that, as I say, out of respect for Berg himself--and his family. It's also interesting to me the extent to which it's been discussed how far to take showing the video, but who is looking into the fact that Incidentally, I suppose one could say that my bringing up such a thing is also cruel to do to Nick Berg, but I don't agree. Showing a person's death seems to me to be a violation against a person's very humanity. No matter who it is, no matter what they've done or been involved in, I cannot see that as ever being justifiable. I also find this hand-wringing over what to do to be silly, ironically, considering that I'm aware that, before I was born, tv news showed combat footage during the Vietnam War. I know people who grew up with that on air before them. I don't entirely approve of that either, but I do think it more responsible, because within the footage itself there is context of a life and death struggle. My thoughts, Posted by: Diane at May 16, 2004 10:03 AM | Permalink I'll admit there seemed to be a "gotcha" moment happening in the prison pix, but nobody in the "mass" media wants to cross the rubicon in which the physical act of one man killing another is played out on their pages or newscasts. If a bunch of people need a 21st century bloody shirt to prop up their support of the war, so be it. That's what the Internet's for. I just don't think the networks or any of the rest of us want to live in a world where the tape loop of a guy being beheaded gets repeated every 15 minutes on the hour. It's degrading, inhumane ... for Christ's sake it's just unthinkable. Every day we wonder, "how low must we sink to sate an audience?" ... and reality TV, commercial interests and the Internet table pounders keep saying they want us to sink lower -- then turn around and attack us for sensationalism when we do. The errors of fact we report are bad enough. The intrusions into the lives of suffering, grieving people are bad enough. The bias and score-settling are bad enough. The demand for profit margins at the expense of reporting the news are bad enough. At some point, though, there has to be a limit on how badly we degrade our basic humanity in the name of earning a living and reporting the news. Call me a liberal, a coward, a traitor, I don't care. I draw the line at decapitation. Posted by: tom mangan at May 16, 2004 10:19 AM | Permalink Interesting discussion. I would just like to register my disagreement with the assertion of many conservatives that the news media is refusing to air this tape for political reasons. It seems to me self-evident that such a gruesome act would not normally be shown on television -- regardless of whose agenda would be served by the broadcast. As Jay notes, that may well be about to change. . . At the same time, I do think this is a good illustration of the Web's ability to make available information that the news media refuses to broadcast. The media no longer has a complete stranglehold on information. As Jeff Jarvis points out on a regular basis, it's a revolution. The reason the torture photos were aired is that the victims are Iraqis. So, in addition to the gruesomeness of the beheading, another couple reasons that the torture photos are broadcast while the beheading is not are racism and nationalism. The Vietnam head shot execution clip has been aired innumuerable times on television - the perp and the victim were both Vietnamese. What is particularly digusting is the ranting from the right that the beheading should be shown for its political value. Since the identity of the perpetrators is unknown - somehow an "anonymous source" saying that there is a "high probablity" that zarqawi was the agent has become "the CIA has confirmed..." - the actual poltical fallout won't be known until it is, and that could bite them in the ass. Posted by: panopticon at May 16, 2004 10:55 AM | Permalink The most profound thing you said, Jay, is that the press needs to talk about it's role in the war on terrorism (and it IS a war). The thing that bothers me most about the humiliation photos is the future danger to American servicemen and women who might become war captives anywhere. It's hard to demand other governments follow the Geneva Conventions when we don't do it ourselves. In terms of the war, you have to admit the Berg videotape was a very dumb tactical move by the enemy, especially with the PR nightmare of Abu Ghraib giving them a moral high ground victory, of sorts. The tape puts the whole thing in perspective (for me anyway) and does nothing except advance the war effort. Finally, Jay, there's another major media paradigm being challenged with this war. I think it was Napolean who said that the victor gets to write the history of the conflict. No more. Now that everybody's "armed" with a digital camera and a blog, who's going to write the history? Great piece (as usual) Terry Posted by: Terry Heaton at May 16, 2004 2:54 PM | Permalink "If it bleeds, it leads" is not a blog/Internet slogan. The problem for a journalistic organization that seeks to adhere to some sort of code of respectability, is how to show just enough to attract the audience via titillation, yet not repel them via disgust. There's different trade-off points here, and one aspect is that "news" allows one to shift along the curve (as in "it's not us, really, it's the evil guys, we're just showing you because you need to know ...") My guess is that "The Internet" is not yet a good enough excuse to allow others to display what's literally a live execution. As in: "Left to their own devices, the three networks would televise live executions. Except Fox -- they'd televise live naked executions." [Gary David Goldberg] Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at May 16, 2004 3:33 PM | Permalink Jay, thanks. Good summary of issues. Here are my take aways: 1. Hypocrisy (motivations). a. The media cannot argue the importance of showing the horrors of war to justify some coverage, then argue the depravity of covering another act deemed too horrific. The wounded child in an Iraqi hospital from a US bomb or an insurgent's IED versus the contractors' burned bodies, hung from the bridge in Fallujah, versus the Abu Ghraib photos versus the beheading of Nick Berg. Either show it or don't show it. b. There is war propaganda, anti-war propaganda, US propaganda, Iraqi propaganda, AQ propaganda, Shia propaganda, Sunni propaganda, Kurdish propaganda, Euro-weasel (I know) propaganda, .... Partisans cry if their propaganda isn't getting more attention than a ideological/political/social competitor's. 2. What is and isn't news from a watchdog's POV (motivations). This wasn't covered as well as I had hoped. a. There is more "news" in we're the bad guys stories than in terrorists are bad guys stories. b. There is a significant reward system in place, and likelihood of having an impact, in being a watchdog over your democratic "good guy" government. Writing watchdog stories about "bad guys" like terrorists or autocrats is seldom rewarded, seldom results in a change in their behavior, and often results in you or someone you feel an obligation to becoming a target. 3. Context, perspective and volume. (Implications over time). a. How many stories, how much innuendo and anonymous sourcing, how many days in a row, .... We're seeing the same Abu Ghraib pictures every day now. There are 1,000 more out there. There are several minutes of Nick Berg's beheading with a half-dozen relevant screencaptures that are not being shown with a potential lifecycle of a week. b. Historical context, trends and future directions. Probably the most difficult. My spidey-bias-sense was tingling reading Douglas Kutach's post on the historical lessons to apply. Should we look to the US invasions of North Africa and Europe in WWII for our lessons? The Pacific islands and Japan? Korea? Vietnam? I've seen such "reporting", both trying to justify our fight alongside the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and AQ in Afghanistan, as well as our fight in Iraq that has pitted coalition troops and Iraqis against other Iraqis, Arabists and jihadists. I've also seen comparisons to the past and current European ventures in the region. Periodicals, magazines, CSM, etc., do more of this than you might see on your half hour TV news broadcast. I agree that what is missing is the media's discussion with their consumers of their role in the war. As a consumer, I think there are apologists, critics, muckrakers/watchdogs, sensationalists and sometimes a compilation of the above. Posted by: Tim at May 16, 2004 4:48 PM | Permalink "In terms of the war, you have to admit the Berg videotape was a very dumb tactical move by the enemy" The problem with this whole exercise is that the identities of the Berg executioners are not known, while the identities of the Abu Ghraib torturers are. Posted by: panopticon at May 16, 2004 7:05 PM | Permalink > editors and other gatekeepers in Big Media are mistaken--and proving themselves clueless, biased, disconnected or at least inconsistent--by not allowing, through the front page and newscast filter, the true gruesomeness and politicized horror of the Nick Berg killing. Huh? No one so far has mentioned the simple difference between Push and Pull media. Our newspaper, a push medium, is in the home and available to people we do not feel need the graphic representations implicit in the Berg video terrorism. We feel we can convey the message sufficiently without the image. And readers are welcome to go to pull media such as the internet to drill down to the grisly detail -- although it seems unnecessary. Some of the pontifications opined so far overreach a bit. Take a few seconds and reflect on the fact that what you wanted to say or have published has actually become a reality, BECAUSE OF BLOGGING!!! It takes me a few minutes to read our local newspaper and there isn't really much to read. Maybe an occasional "interesting" story, and the Obits, but that's about it. And if I wrote a letter to the editor asking him to publish MY opinion on ANY story, the chances of that happening are pretty slim. That's where I think blogging comes in. We don't necessarily agree with one another, but we can say(write)what ever we want, without censorship. Can YOU do that in the newspaper or magazine that you read daily? I doubt it! It's too bad that it takes the death of a young man to bring to light the fact that we are constrained by many avenues from being able to say what we really feel. Maybe we should start blogging on the people who blog, who for the most part have more sense and compassion than the "educated journalist". And no, I didn't watch the latest, horrific video, I don't need or want to; like one of the other writers, I work in an ER and have seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I saw the planes fly into the buildings on 9/11, but I have no need to watch or rewatch it everyday. Our minds are like little tape recorders and certain images can't be erased. I don't want another unerasable movie in my mind. The last movie I saw before the "Passion" was "Bambi". And I intend to keep it that way! Posted by: k. Mason at May 17, 2004 3:11 AM | Permalink My somewhat melodramatic take on the torture, the beheading, the images, and the gates of hell. Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at May 17, 2004 3:57 AM | Permalink For what it's worth.... Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at May 17, 2004 3:57 AM | Permalink Yes, the press should ponder its role in the war on terrorism. The press does not exist in some ethereal, intellectual space separate and distinct from society. People may indeed live or die based on what they write or portray by image. What is the responsibility of the photographer who these days can be found just as surely embedded with terrorists as with our side? Do they even think "our side"? How can they still deny their role, when people like Giap and Tariq Aziz and even Hitler before them proved them so? I am glad we have a free press; that doesn't mean I have to accept the sometimes dangerous moralizing by the likes of Schapiro and Koppel. Posted by: PJ at May 17, 2004 10:54 AM | Permalink One question is whether the people's interest in seeing the video is not merely indicative of their political interest in the images, but a voyueristic impulse. Last week I had a voyueristic urge to see what the video showed, but didn't know where to find it and didn't want to search it out. Then I found that Salon.com had linked to it. I clicked on the link, but 10 seconds into it, before the violence, I closed the window. I realized whatever was about to be shown I didn't really want to see it. Salon ran letters from readers, one commented that he has seen the Danny Pearl video and regreted it. That must have been something he also sought out on the internet as I know of no major news network that showed it. One thing to note is there is a difference between the prison photos and the Berg video. The photos shown on the mass media are just not as graphic. (that is not to say that graphic photos from the prison might not exist). There have been stories that say videos from the prison exist as well. Should they become public I am certain that no TV station will show them (perhaps stills though) and interest will be twice as high. I have two points. I don't believe that interest in seeing the videos is reason to show them. I'm not talking about what's good for the masses or not good for them. Just because people are finding away around the mass media blackout of them (major stories and newsproviders NEVER linked to the videos, notice?) doesn't necessarily mean that it was wrong for the news media to not show them. People have a high amount of interest in purient items, the jacket jackson breast "shot" for example. There has always been a balance to showing rawness on TV, even in war. As distrubing as the images from Vietnam were, I recall intereviews with reporters and photographers that talked about what DIDN'T get on the air. Our society has decided to limit graphic images distribution, to make it difficult to get, from porn to violence. That's why we don't broadcast state executions. No doubt this IS political. And I fully agree with you Jay that the Press needs to step up and articulate why some disturbing images are shown but not others otherwise it does lead to easy conclusions that the press is "for" someone and "against" others. It is interesting to think that while the press is not a single entity (despite being owned by 7 companies) its behaving like a single entity when it comes to showing this video. There have been some who have come close to breaking ranks (such as the Dallas paper) but not many. The reason is political but not for the easy manner describe by some (that the press is against the war). I would argue that the prison photos are just less disturbing than the Berg murder, and that's why they were shown. The prison videos will not be shown because they will be too disturbing. The "political" decision here is deciding what are the bounds of the public's capabilities to handle. Usually this is set pretty low. Posted by: catrina at May 17, 2004 12:26 PM | Permalink Jay, great note of the silence about the press role. I saw the disgusting, hate-creating, fear-inducing, spine-steeling video of the beheading. I knew of, but did not see, the Daniel Pearl video. The CBS/ media anti-Bush bias becomes inevitable when they censor themselves and NOT show the Nick Berg beheading. The killers claim it was BECAUSE of Abu -- despite the abuse being last years "news", with a general already being fired in Jan., and the military investigating. (And prolly doing a poor job, looking to scapegoat a low rank soldier, who had taken pictures, without a full examination of the whole MP - MI interrogation stuff.) The media IS an active participant in the War on Terror, it is NOT a third person narrator of a novel. Whose side are they on? If they are on the side of truth-- they must show the video. Roger Simon has a rumor that videos of torture of Saddam are available. Is the US at war? Who are we fighting? What is the "true" perspective? The snuff film video IS disgusting. BUT, those hooded men will run Iraq if Bush runs away -- JUST like Pol Pot murdered 2 million after Kerry's anti-V. War group was successful in the US running away from SE Asia. The Bush-hate noise, like with Abu, is so loud that neither constructive criticism can be heard, nor is there perspective on other atrocities. Where are pictures of the April 17 murder of 3 Americans by the UN (in Kosovo)? I have no objection to the Berg photos/video being published, but I question some of the reasoning: • Are search engines — indeed the Web in general - indicative of "public judgement?" I believe pornography would top any unfiltered ranking — and unfiltered is the point, right? • If the Berg video is indicative of the "reality" of the war, why not publish uncensored pictures/video ofAmerican soldiers and Iraq civilians being killed? • If one considers the Berg video to be an al Qaeda "press release," how is it different from similar materials produced by other hate groups? • Is there any actual evidence that editors are playing up the prison photos at the expense of the Berg video? I could just as easily accuse the "warbloggers" of playing up the Berg video to deflect attention from the prison photos. Posted by: Grant D. at May 17, 2004 1:04 PM | Permalink Where is this concern for voyeurism coming from? Is this a deflection? The sexually posed Iraqis had no voyeuristic quality? THAT DOESN'T SELL PAPERS OR RAISE RATINGS!?! http://www.ratherbiased.com/news/content/view/84/2 "Just three weeks ago, Mr. Rather's other CBS production 48 Hours broadcast gruesome still photos of Princess Di as she lay dying after an August 1997 car crash in Paris. "The photos sparked near-universal outrage in the British press. No other U.S. TV outlets dared show the horrific images. Mohamed Al Fayed, father or Diana's paramour Dodi Al Fayed, denounced the network for its publicity stunt and filed a lawsuit claiming defamation." During the Vietnam War ... CBS aired extremely graphic pictures of a U.S. allied South Vietnamese soldier shooting a Vietcong officer in the head. CBS even produced a special report on the event, complete with a play-by-play narration from correspondent John Lawrence. Other graphic and offensive images which have been broadcast by CBS and other American networks include footage of a burned and naked Vietnamese girl running away from South Vietnamese napalm and the infamous Rodney King beating. NBC has twice (1997 and 1999) broadcasted the uncensored versions of the 1993 Holocaust film Schindler's List, complete with ghastly imagery and full female nudity. Posted by: Tim at May 17, 2004 1:07 PM | Permalink It's all very simple, really. When images of of Americans torturing Arab prisoners are shown it's the "Liberal Media" spreading its noxious propaganda. When images of Berg's murder are shown it's OK. Any attempt to supress the former is justified. Any attempt to supress the latter is unjustified. As I'm sure you're as tired of Orwell as I am let's at the point simply insert the last reel of Posted by: David Ehrenstein at May 17, 2004 1:22 PM | Permalink All of these "bias in the media" questions would be moot if we had a Euro-style press that was open and honest about it's bias and political POV. The press demands "transparency" of others but when will the press begin to display "transparency" itself? Our US press will not be able to sustain the "objectivity" ruse much longer. Posted by: paladin at May 17, 2004 2:37 PM | Permalink First: The photos of beheaded corpses hanging from a bridge in Falluja were representations of atrocities committed against Americans, and yet my recollection is that criticism surrounding the publication of those photos included claims that such imagery would weaken Americans' resolve for the war, which would be unpatriotic. If that argument was true for Falluja, why are we to presume that showing Nicholas Berg's beheading would strenghten Americans' resolve, which would make withholding the images an anti-war act? Second: One thing that seems to be getting lost in this tit-for-tat debate (you showed Abu Ghraib photos; now you're obliged to show Nicholas Berg's beheading) is the relative news value of each. It's not news to me, or I suspect to most others, that Islamist terrorists are ruthless fanatics who want all of us (Americans, Westerners, what have you) dead. I don't need to see a videotaped beheading to get that. Sept. 11 was pretty convincing. But, you know what? It was news to me that American soldiers, either on their own or as a matter of policy, were systematically abusing, humilitating and doing God knows what else to the people we went over to liberate -- many of whom had not been accused of any wrongdoing. To suggest that the Abu Ghraib revelations can be mitigated by showing graphic evidence that however awful some Americans have been to some Iraqis, some Iraqis or other Middle Easterners have been even worse to some Americans, is specious at best. Abu Ghraib is shocking and appalling because we as a nation desperately want, and believed that we held, the moral high ground in Iraq. The erosion of that moral high ground is the news, not the relative repulsiveness of each side's actions. In terms of editors' decisions to show or not show any of these images, it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of newsrooms want to show as much of everything as they can without alienating readers and viewers by going overboard. There has been a general squeamishness about publishing any unpleasant images from Afghanistan or Iraq, but that seems to have changed over the past few weeks, dating back to Falluja. There is a tremendous danger in withholding all images of pain, cruelty or death that are inevitable in war, because, as John McCain said recently, free people are obligated to understand the costs and consequences of armed conflict. But editors always have to decide what is too graphic and too gruesome to publish in a general circulation newspaper or broadcast. From what I've read of the Berg beheading, the starkest images seem inappropriate for publication. It strikes me as odd that anyone who may object to running photos of flag-draped coffins as an invasion of privacy or overly manipulative could call for an unedited showcasing of a decapitation staged as a terrorist's public relations stunt. Posted by: Perry Parks at May 17, 2004 5:05 PM | Permalink Hello, everyone, and thank you for these well-considered comments. Tom Mangan: I agree that the Berg video should not--and as a practical matter, could not--be shown in 24-hour cable rotation. To Catrina and several others: I agree that "there's viewer demand" is not a good enough reason to show anything. If that were so, the Paris Hilton video would have been in the CNN rotation, etc. Stephen (sbw): That's a very good point about push vs. pull media. One could argue--and I guess you are--that "the system" worked the way it should. Those who make a conscious decision to seek it out can find the Berg video, while those just watching or picking up the paper will not be surprised by it. However, this does not address the claims of those who think Americans should see what happened to Nick Berg, whether they "want" to or not. There are times when journalists make decisions like that (the prison photos may be such a case), so one can reasonably ask: why not in this case? And if I may add something else, Stephen. Phrases like this, "Some of the pontifications opined so far..." make you sound like a jerk-- pontificating about who's a pontificator. Since I am quite sure this is a misimpression, and that you're actually not a jerk, you might adjust your writing style to more accurately reflect who you are and what you have to say. That's just advice; you are free to say (almost) anything you want here, and strike any pose. Douglas: that the principle of proportionality in news coverage is sometimes in conflict with the principle of balance--and that proportionality might be the better guide--is a great point, and exactly what I meant when I said that many in the news media have not really thought through their role in the fight against terrorism. It won't be easy, but as you rightly said: "a thoughtful person can at least try." Terry Heaton: I am just not sure that "the Berg videotape was a very dumb tactical move by the enemy, especially with the PR nightmare of Abu Ghraib giving them a moral high ground victory, of sorts." What makes you think they want what we regard as the "moral high ground." It's not clear to me that this is so. Gerald writes: "I can tell you from personal experience with just one still that while you think you are ready for it, you are not." I had that experience too. But in the world we're in, maybe what we're "ready" for cannot be the horizon of our informational experience. Maybe it still can, but maybe it now cannot. Tim: It is true that when it comes to the deeds of Al Queda, "watchdog" journalism is irrelevant, because corrective action is irrelevant; whereas with illegal and abusive practices by U.S. actors, the watchdog press is necessary. Thus, you won't see the same level of coverage across cases. This is one of the many reasons why "what's good for the goose is good for the gander"-style arguments are not sound as their makers think. The ease of pointing out an inconsistency in journalistic treatment, a "double standard" (and then deducing from that a craven, manipulative, or hostile intent in the press) sometimes causes us to overlook very significant and at times profound differences between cases. David E: You captured concisely and precisely what bothered me about some of the more reflexive responses on the right-- and there were a lot of those. Please keep the conversation going. Cheers. Perry Parks, Let's address the news value aspect of this hypocrisy. Is the press informing us that we're the bad guys because that's news, and the bad guys are really the good guys since no news is good news? Is the press repeating its failure prior to 9/11? What news value was there prior to 9/11 that Islamic terrorists are ruthless fanatics after the Khobar Tower, African Embassies and USS Cole bombings? Did you feel well-informed when the second airplane hit the WTC? Are we being kept well-informed about how Islamic militancy has morphed over the past 2 1/2 years since 9/11 in response to our efforts? Do we understand how leadership losses and replacements have impacted these loose organizations? Has Zarqawi become a new leader in the Isalmic militancy, with Berg's beheading a political demonstration of his new status? Do we understand why Zarqawi felt the videotape was important from his POV if it has no, or less, news value from our POV? Is Jay Rosen correct to admonish those that question the value of Zarqawi's act in terms of our politics, our moral high ground? Would a sense of Islamic watchdog journalism in the American media help us to understand our enemy, his culture, the war, and the Iraqi people we are helping to rebuild a socio-economic and political nation? Or is all that dwarfed by our myopically American POV news value? Do we have a better understanding how states in the Middle East, Europe and Asia have modified (for better or worse) their relationships to the old and newly morphed Islamic militancy? How much of the well publicized opinion polls translate into actually fighting against us or the terrorists? How much of those polls are influenced by showing or not showing pictures and video? Could the same pictures and video have different effects among different audiences and cultures? Can I argue that coffins, prison abuse, Fallujah lynchings and beheadings should all be shown and discussed with the same emotional pull, or at least proportional to the "news value"? Perhaps with at least the same modicum of justification as showing Princess Di's death photos? The bottomline is the hypocrisy, the role of watchdog, and more critically the role as conduit for critical information. I have heard no good arguement for why a screenshot of Berg pulled prostrate on his side and held down with a knife to his throat could not have been shown. Nor have I heard why everyone but the Dallas Morning News (to my knowledge) did even show a blurred or blocked out photo of his beheading? Why not even a clip that fades with his dying screams? No news value? Perhaps we don't really understand the news value of Berg's beheading because we have already preconceived (and wrong) metrics for evaluating news? Posted by: Tim at May 17, 2004 6:24 PM | Permalink I'm getting that old familiar feeling and somehow I just can't shake the belief that it is related to this discussion. There is more "news value" today in the voting for American Idol than in the voting in Iraq for democratically elected councils. Can you say Condit and August 2001? Posted by: Tim at May 17, 2004 6:52 PM | Permalink "I have heard no good arguement for why a screenshot of Berg pulled prostrate on his side and held down with a knife to his throat could not have been shown." That is barbaric on a moral level and naive on a psychological level. Psychologically, that which is *not* shown has a greater impact than that which is - a truth which explains the effectiveness, for instance, of Alfred Hitchcock's directorial method - something the editors of the largely faked Nick Berg video seem to have realized. Morally, well we really don't need to go into that, do we? If you need an explanation of why one should not engage in tit-for-tat game of oneupmanship you probably have passed into a region beyond reason. Practically, the reason why the torture photos are widely disseminated in US media is that the victims are Iraqi. The very same nationlism, racism, and xenophobia that precipitated the torture are present in the media "dissemination" of the torture photos. I have never once heard anyone expressing concern for the Iraqi victims based on the publication of the photos - and not all of them were wearing hoods or had their faces airbrushed. Posted by: panopticon at May 17, 2004 10:07 PM | Permalink Jay, There may have been such reflexive responses on the right -- but not from all of us. I applaud the dissemination of the Abu Ghraib abuses. There is nothing to be gained by trying to put a lid on something like that. As for the Berg video, I fully sympathize with those who say it should be shown -- but I won't accuse outlets of liberal bias for failing to show it. Its gruesome nature is a sufficient explanation, in my opinion. I'm not the only believer in the "liberal media thesis" who feels this way, either. Tom Mangan - "I'll admit there seemed to be a "gotcha" moment happening in the prison pix, but nobody in the "mass" media wants to cross the rubicon in which the physical act of one man killing another is played out on their pages or newscasts." Perhaps not, but we can all watch as a man is shot several times on camera at point blank range. We've been treated to non-stop hours of riots and watched a man's head bashed in with a brick. We've been treated to live action sustained shootouts between police and bank robbers. Some rubicon. The only part of the Berg video that exceeds those standards of decency (barbaric on a moral and psychological level) is the actual act of severing the head. Posted by: Tim at May 18, 2004 1:20 AM | Permalink I thought of another argument against showing the video. I haven't seen anyone make it, which is probably sign of its limited appeal. But some comments pass by it when they say: there's no need to show the act itself to get the point-- and to have the news. A short clip of Berg on the floor with those menacing, masked people behind him, plus the raw knowledge--American, beheaded--is "enough," which means, I think, we have in an instant enough information to get the picture and to know: this was beyond horrible. Footage beyond that is gratuitous, or pornographic-- in any case unnecessary. "Without seeing it, we get the point." But this isn't only a statement about the scant news value in further gore. It also means: we can imagine the rest. And here is where another argument could arise for not showing the beheading. Maybe we should have to imagine it. Maybe that's the way truly to know it. Maybe that's when you take it seriously. Seeing is believing, they say. But if this were wholly true, we wouldn't read to our children from books without pictures. If it were wholly true, footage from the concentration camps would be enough to believe it all really happened. But is it? We talk endlessly about what information citizens need to be informed. We almost never talk about what they need to imagine in order to reach the same state. There is value, I think, in having to fill in the awful rest. Thoughts on this? Jay, So, would your argument have called for pictures from Abu Ghraib with American MPs inprocessing clothed Iraqi prisoners plus the raw knowledge -- Iraqis, abused? Is the double standard showing acts by American soldiers and leaving to the imagination acts by our enemies? Is the double standard showing pictures of leashes and naked pyramids, but leave to the imagination the Abu Ghraib consensual sex pictures, sodomy and rape? Have we been provided the appropriate images to imagine the rest? Were the sexual humiliation pictures from Abu Ghraib needed to be able to imagine, and believe it possible, worse acts captured on photographs and videos. In the same light, is it enough to see the menacing figures behind Berg and imagine what the video depicts or was something more "pornographic" needed to communicate to our imagination the barbarity and outrage of the act? Does panopticon have a point? Would the news judgement of where in the video it became pornographic be different if it was an American beheading an Iraqi or an American beheading another American? Posted by: Tim at May 18, 2004 8:13 AM | Permalink > Phrases like this, "Some of the pontifications opined so far..." make you sound like a jerk-- pontificating about who's a pontificator. Since I am quite sure this is a misimpression, and that you're actually not a jerk, you might adjust your writing style to more accurately reflect who you are and what you have to say. Fair enough. You can't hope to exchange ideas with people if you violate the sympatheic contract and they feel rebuked. Thanks for the constructive advice. I'll try to do better next time. --- Let me ask, is there a responsibility to point out when comments overreach and, if so, does it fall to those commenting to mention it or to the blogger? One hazard of laissez faire blog moderation is that what I call the "Law of Coinciding Blunders" has more opportunity to prevail in the undampened, interactive feedback system of the blogosphere. Under this law, trivial mistakes are made every day by all of us. Occasionally they happen in such order and timing that the collective result is a major calamity. Previously we have depended on the slowness of communication to act like moderating rods in a reactor. Another hazard is that while everyone is entitled to an opinion, you don't have to know anything to have one. Where is Emily Post to help us develop the blogging grace to detect and protect ourselves from wind? If we don't, too many readers will decide that reading through the chaff for the wheat simply isn't worth the effort. As one who teaches journalism and the quality that ought to be associated with it, you have more opportunity than most bloggers. In other words, in your classes you likely cover philosophy, content and style. Should you cover philosophy, content and style in your blog? Or just philosophy, alone? In our race towards civilzation, language equates to thought and slipshod isn't smart. [Hint: Please buy a copy of Sister Miriam Joseph's "The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric" and Richard Mitchell's "Less Than Words Can Say".] You probably have more blog readers than people you have blog commenting. What might cause your blog readers sufficient discomfort to lead them to make the observation about overreaching in the first place? Tim: I don't have a fully worked out argument on this one. I just wanted to introduce the idea that imagination has some role in making us informed. How much we need to imagine the rest... well, that is hard to say. Stephen: if people "overeach" in their comments (and I am not totally sure what that means) then successive comments can critique the overreacher. I don't think you do that by saying: "you're pontificating." You do it with pointed criticisms about specific things said. A general condemnation is of no help. Comments at PressThink tend to be longer than at other blogs because the posts are longer. My primary concern is not preventing people from "overreaching" in comments, but from insulting one another. Nor do I think I should be adjudicating matters of style. Jay, The problem with relying on imagination for filling in the holes is enough information needs to be provided to get you close enough to what's being shown without allowing you to go past that point and imagine something you may be predisposed to believe but would not be supported in the omitted information. I would think that most readers already have their imagination in gear trying to read between the lines; figuring out how the neocons, communists or Illuminati benefit; what were the motivations of the obviously biased author; .... I think we rely on the imagination to present news using Alfred Hitchcock's editorial standard. We are shown the wrecked cars and told the number of people unharmed, injured and dead - but we are seldom shown the dead. Do we need to imagine the details of their deaths and the conditions of their dead bodies to be informed? Is that the same as the imagining the beheading? Posted by: Tim at May 18, 2004 11:37 AM | Permalink Another problem I have is the conspiratorial nature of the imagination. Posted by: Tim at May 18, 2004 12:36 PM | Permalink It's not a fully worked out argument, Tim. Thus it has all kinds of problems and holes. I'm just saying imagination is involved in staying informed, but we rarely think about it. For example, isn't it necessary is keep imagining what life was like under Saddam for an American to grasp today's news of what it's like there now-- under American instead of Batthist rule? And if you don't make that effort, would you not have a distorted picture of the present? Jay, This reminds me of an article I wrote called 'The Narrative as Battlefield' right after Saddam's capture. Extending what you're talking about here about the role of network news in the war on terror, let's explore the role of blogs in the war on terror. If terrorism is meant partially as a communications strategy, then bloggers are part of the war on terror, and what they - we - do is part of the global violent struggle, especially if TV is responding to internet pressures. To call this the 'democratization' of warfare, where any voice matters simply because it helps shape the narrative, is somewhat inhumane. But the rapid media cycle, which dicates decisions about where to deploy massive resources, has taken on added importance, and if you can penetrate the narrative, you can become an actor in modern warfare. The globalization of the media apparatus has destroyed Vandenberg's implicit assumption that the politics of war and domestic politics can be separate. War is now everywhere there is a voice about the war, and battles are only the most violent and hurtful symbols of conflict. I don't think you can truly separate political implications from political motivations anymore. If terrorists are optimizing around ABC news and Iraqi insurgents are talking about Bush's reelection campaign, then the news media's choices about its contextualization versus its patriot duty as an America-first institution is in essential conflict. When telling the story means granting short-term advantage to terrorists, flashpoints like this show up. "Terrorism can be many things, but it is always an attempt at communication" This quote reminds me of my reaction to 9/11, an event which occurred before our eyes in real time, though even there we were not shown footage of people jumping and so on. But if you just take the images that were produced by the terrorists - the planes going into buildings, especially the second one, with the first building already on fire. Then the next building on fire. Then one falling. The the next. Take your quote, Jay, that terrorism is always an attempt at communication." I'm a psychologist. On 9/11 my first tho |
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