'Good taste' prevailed in the news networks' war coverage. Was truth a casualty?

Cable World,  April 21, 2003  

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Byline: MATTHEW GRIMM

We all saw the statue falling, jubilant Iraqis trouncing it, an epoch-making moment for Iraq. Or was it? Few have seen the wide shot, never broadcast in the U.S., that revealed only a handful of Iraqis, in a city of 5 million, in the vast, desolate Fardus Square.

As mop-up continues, as Operation Demonize Syria ramps up, it's worth a visit to that image (www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2838.htm) just to see cursory evidence of the chasm between the reality of war and how we are supposed to perceive it. In war, recall, people die and are maimed, the immediate, purposeful fruit of some $330 billion of our tax dollars. And yet, to watch America's dedicated news channels for scores of hours, as I have done in recent weeks, as juxtaposed to BBC and sundry news sites, the sordid, if sometimes necessary, payoff on that investment appears to have been airbrushed out.

Stark reality, it seems, has become verboten in today's news discourse. One overseas news medium, Al Jazeera, has been bombed in Iraq (and, coincidentally or not, Afghanistan) and digitally shuttered in the U.S. for showing the wrong side of the payoff - dead soldiers, amputees, hospital corridors that look like killing fields. Americans, meanwhile, have seen a chorus of cheerleading, Hallmark-worthy GI stories, a parade of ex-brass, video-game graphics and scarcely a clue that something nearly unimaginable in its horror is occurring. In the no-man's-land between the two lies the mutilated body of ethical journalism.

This is not to suggest that we should see only a parade of scorched bodies and bloody kids. Nor is it to shrug off the harm's way into which many embedded news reporters have ventured. But it would seem that, for a news organization, the palpable consequences of war - Baghdad hospitals overflowing, the Red Cross declaring civilian casualties beyond its capacity to count, the persistent lack of hard evidence of the weapons that purportedly justified the war - would merit some coverage even amid the Sgt. Rock comics being beamed back home.

Execs at CNN and Fox said there were no standards-and-practices criteria for what images didn't make it on air, and decisions were made on "case-by-case" bases. MSNBC did not respond to inquiries. "We balance our need to tell a story as completely and accurately as we can while being mindful of the sensibilities of our audience," CNN spokesman Matthew Furman said. Fox director of news gathering David Rhodes qualified that his staff did weigh images against "standards of good taste."

So "good taste" and audience "sensibilities" must delineate the two different wars being broadcast here and abroad, but these lie in a profoundly subjective realm. Insulated by a conservative measure of "good taste," Americans would never have seen the napalmed girl running out of Trang Bang village or Tet execution of the Vietcong suspect by Saigon's police chief. Would the starkness of such images make them not just news-unworthy today, but somehow unpatriotic? Are there such images from Iraq, never to be seen, that might at least be worth our consideration prior to a cavalier blitzkrieg toward Damascus?

Images didn't end the Vietnam War - they simply offered Americans a broader scope of their government's actions than they'd ever seen before. Today, in spite of vastly greater news resources, that scope wears blinders, as even cheerleaders admit.

PR measurement expert Katie Delahaye Paine, in her firm's publication The Measurement Standard, applauded the embed policy's "sheer genius" for its root in "the basic tenet of public relations: It's all about relationships...journalists making dozens - if not hundreds - of new friends among the armed forces. And, if the bosses of their newfound buddies want to get a key message or two across about how sensitive the U.S. is being to humanitarian needs or how humanely they are treating Iraqis, what better way than through these embedded journalists?...[M]ost, if not all, of the dozens of stories being filed contain key messages the Department of Defense wants to communicate."

A triumph of PR wile is never a "win-win" for legitimate journalism. The purpose of an independent press is to facilitate an enlightened public, enabling them to participate in self-government unconstrained or coerced by powerful institutions, including the sitting administration. Those who edit these images from public consciousness, in direct or unspoken collusion with the government, have nullified such public scrutiny - the very specific and unconditional raison d'etre of the fourth estate.

In abrogating their mission, they become little more than flacks for the White House. Soviet-era Pravda could do no less.

Matthew Grimm is a columnist for American Demographics, the former editor of Brandweek and the front man for The Hangdogs, a popular New York-based rock & roll band.

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