(no subject)

[winterbadger]

from a long and fascinating speech by Bill Moyers:

The Chicago Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about half of those surveyed said there should be been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those people don’t want the facts to disturb their belief system about American exceptionalism. The poll also found that five or six of every ten Americans “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.” No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.

This relates, in part, to a question I had been wondering about recently: the extent of graphic coverage of human death and destruction in the press. When Americans are outraged by pictures of dead servicemen and women on battlefields or American POWs who have been beaten in captivity, when the administration tried to suppress pictures of caskets coming back from Iraq; when a bus bombing in Israel resulted in a photo in the American press showing one of the bomb's dead victims; when a friend from overseas mentioned that the European press had been much more "graphic" in its coverage of the horrifc debacle at Beslan... I could only think of the photographs exhibited by Matthew Brady of "The Dead of Antietam" and the comment

"Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war," wrote a New York Times correspondent on October 20. "If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it."

I think we *need* to see that reality. Most of us do not have to live it. But in a world where we, through our elected officials, the pressure groups, the religions, the professional societies, even some of us through our own jobs influence the world to peace or war, to suppression and tyrrany, to terrorism and the vengeance of coutner-terrorism, we need to be reminded what the costs of such decisions are. This was brought home to me listening to NPR this morning when they played a clip from a film someone was exhibiting in a festival in Canada. It's all shot among US troops overseas, and one artilleryman was remarking that it was all very well for those watching the film, who lived at home, went to jobs 9-5, perhaps saw the doucmentary on tlevision in between trips to the refrigerator. "When we're done here," he said, "none of those people will remember this. Only those of us who were here will remember this." We all need to remember it.

Comments

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

The press are very much complicit in this "information blackout" that keeps the public from knowing the truth. If we knew all of what our actions, and the actions of our leaders, cost us...

[robbysmom.livejournal.com]

right, without knowing what the gov't is doing in our name, we have bread and circuses only-- as tho we asked only for bread and circuses, just like Bonaparte said. . . (mind you, only soem of have bread or can afford the circus-- speaking of the pink elephant in the room)