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COMMENTARY
Double standards in
reporting casualties
By Pascale
Combelles Siegel
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
The war in Iraq has highlighted how reporting on
casualties during an armed conflict is a sensitive
issue. In the United States, a norm has developed that
immediate family members should not have to learn
through the media of their loved one's death in a
military operation. Since the war in Vietnam, another
norm also has developed: that US blood is rarely shown.
Few US wounded or dead appear in digital color on our TV
screens.
These US norms underlie much of the
outrage at independent Arab television al-Jazeera
satellite channel's broadcast of images of US dead and
prisoners of war. But this outrage masks a potentially
more serious issue that should concern all citizens:
Have the US media been so wrapped in the flag of late
that they have lost objectivity and are undercutting the
informed nature of its citizenry?
One look at
the inconsistent application of the norms over the past
decade raises the suspicion that the answer to that
question is affirmative.
In 1993, for example,
our media took the risk of widely showing grisly war
images of US casualties abroad. US forces had been in
Somalia just under a year and were several months into a
campaign to track down and capture faction leader
Mohamed Farah Aideed. As immortalized in the
award-winning motion picture Black Hawk Down,
their October 3 raid did not go as planned, with 18
dead, 70 wounded and one captured American and an
unconfirmed number of Somali victims.
In a taste
of the globalization of information technology, US
networks received video from Somalis. The first video
showed a crowd of angry Somalis chanting and dancing
around the body of a dead US soldier. Debate raged in US
newsrooms over using the pictures. Serious concerns
weighed against running the video: It would be
insensitive to the victim's family; it could exacerbate
fears of other families and the military community; and
it would play into the hands of Aideed's propaganda
machine.
CNN, other networks and the print media
pondered these issues and determined that their utmost
obligation was to keep people informed. The images were
deemed to carry invaluable information and to show the
reality of war. Therefore, they ran on all networks
throughout the day of their release. Meanwhile, most
newspapers printed photos of the incident on their front
pages, although mainly in black and white, to dampen
their impact.
The next day the nightmarish
coverage heightened when CNN aired a tape provided by
Aideed's faction. The tape was of captured US army
captain, Michael Durant, a Black Hawk pilot. It showed
him severely beaten. The tape, although made for
propaganda purposes, was broadcast throughout the day in
the US. America's objective journalists had plastered
the airwaves with video of a beaten US soldier, provided
by the captors, with no mention that this filming might
violate the Geneva Convention's terms banning the use of
prisoners for propaganda purposes.
But a decade
later, in the war with Iraq, major media shunned similar
war footage. Several days into the war, al-Jazeera aired
a six-minute tape showing four dead US soldiers and five
prisoners of war. All were members of the 507th
maintenance unit that Iraqi forces had ambushed near
Nasariya. This broadcast led to vitriolic reaction from
the Pentagon - and then the US press - as an outrage,
immoral, and a breach of the Geneva Convention.
The US networks agreed to a Pentagon request to
hold onto the tape until families could be notified.
(When approached, al-Jazeera agreed as well to delay
further broadcasts until after notification.) After
family notifications, broadcasts to US viewers provided
only limited portions of the tape showing the prisoners.
These broadcasts almost uniformly were accompanied by
commentary that the Iraqis violated the Geneva
Convention. However, the portion of the tape showing the
four dead bodies never reached the mainstream US
audience. One predictable exception was media critic
Matt Drudge's website, which carried the video in its
entirety. During the process, the networks, it seems,
collectively decided that the US public is not mature
enough to endure images reflecting the grim realities of
combat.
Veteran correspondent Ted Koppel
disagreed with the decision, arguing that death,
destruction and warfare are consubstantial and that
people are entitled to make their own choices about
seeing that reality. But the prevalent media opinion was
certainly different: The pictures were said to be simply
"too gruesome" to be shown to the public. ABC's Charles
Gibbons argued that showing the inhumanity portrayed by
the tape served no purpose and that airing the prisoner
segment was a violation of the Geneva Convention. On
CNN, Aaron Brown chastised al-Jazeera's Washington
bureau chief for choosing to broadcast the entire
segment. In response, the bureau chief argued that US
media outlets displayed double standards, willing to
show Iraqi prisoners of war and casualties or dead
Somalis, but not images of the US's own.
The
networks should be commended for thinking about the
consequences of airing that specific segment. Airing
propaganda pieces has military and political
implications. Both Aideed and Iraq sought to shatter the
US's will to fight by exposing its dead soldiers and
prisoners of war. In each case, the networks could play
into the enemy's hands when deciding whether to show the
pictures. So why the difference in their decisions then
and now?
In 1993, the government did not firmly
lead, while the nation was divided over the operation
and whether it was worth US lives. Today, although
somewhat divided as evidenced by anti-war protests, the
nation is being strongly led and little tolerance exists
for public questioning of the US military. Amid advice
that not being patriotic enough will be bad for
business, US media outlets seem to be competing for a
place among the most patriotic news sources.
This raises a fundamental question as to the
nature of journalism in a free and democratic society.
Should US will and casualty tolerance be the deciding
factor of journalists striving for objectivity? What is
the role of an objective media? Is it to broadcast
uncritically, no matter the source? Clearly it is not.
Is it to follow guidance from the US government and wave
the flag? One hopes it is not. But that is what we have
seen recently in regards to the casualty footage.
Through their coverage, the US media are
undercutting their standing as an objective source of
news and are undermining the basis for American
democracy, with implications for years to come. While
democracy relies on an informed public, US media outlets
today appear more as tools of the US government's
perception management campaign than objective sources of
reports and analysis of the world situation. The United
States - and the world - will suffer from this fall from
the pedestal of journalistic ideals.
Pascale Combelles Siegel
is an independent
defense analyst. She has worked for the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, the National Defense University and
the Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique in
Paris.
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
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