Macswain

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Cover Your Eyes, Chickenhawks

"This is a war the Bush administration does not want Americans to see." So says Gary Kamiya in this piece in Salon today with a number of photographs showing the death & devastation in Iraq.

Kamiya doesn't just blame the Bush administration for the near blackout on photos of the devastation:

[T]he media is also responsible for sanitizing the Iraq war, at times rendering it almost invisible. Most American publications have been reluctant to run graphic war images. Almost no photographs of the 1,868 U.S. troops who have been killed to date in Iraq have appeared in U.S. publications. In May 2005, the Los Angeles Times surveyed six major newspapers and the nation's two leading newsmagazines, and found that over a six-month period, no images of dead American troops appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Time or Newsweek. A single image of a covered body of a slain American ran in the Seattle Times. There were also comparatively few images of wounded Americans. The publications surveyed tended to run more images of dead or wounded Iraqis, but they have hardly been depicted in large numbers either.

4 Comments:

  • Those are very sad disturbing photographs. Why haven't we seen them on FOX?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:34 AM  

  • Fox is too chickenshit to show them. Rolly

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 3:31 PM  

  • There's an interesting interview with Robert Fisk (a Middle East correspondent for 30 years) on how the media are covering the war in this month's Utne Reader (www.utne.com, although I haven't found the article on-line). He basically says that many of his colleagues are either too afraid to go to Iraq or too afraid to leave their hotels once they get there. So, basically, they rely on what the US military tells them.

    Maybe Rolly's right about the chickensh**

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:03 PM  

  • Nathan,

    I think its called cocoon journalism.

    By Blogger Macswain, at 10:03 AM  

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