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See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: The Reality Of Life, And Those That Shield Themselves And Others From It
The three wise monkeys (Japanese: 三猿 Hepburn: san'en or sanzaru, alternatively 三匹の猿 sanbiki no saru, literally "three monkeys"), sometimes called the three mystic apes,[1] are a pictorial maxim. Together they embody the proverbial principle "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".[2] The three monkeys are Mizaru, covering his eyes, who sees no evil; Kikazaru, covering his ears, who hears no evil; and Iwazaru, covering his mouth, who speaks no evil.[3]
There are various meanings ascribed to the monkeys and the proverb including associations with being of good mind, speech and action. In the Western world the phrase is often used to refer to those who deal with impropriety by turning a blind eye.[4]
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False Flag Theories Crash Into Brutal Realty In Las Vegas
In response to skeptics of the Las Vegas massacre who claim it was a false-flag operation involving crisis actors because news photos, online images and social media have not shown realistic gunshot wounds caused by high-velocity munitions, I must here state that sort of argument arises from a severe ignorance of media ethics about the release of images of graphic gore, as discussed below.
The doubters have noted that patients released from hospital soon after the Oct. 1 shooting are 'smiling (top) happily.' So would you if your flesh had been hit by a mere fragment of a bullet or a pebble of concrete dislodged by ordnance striking the pavement. Despite any mood suppression from medication, you would be overjoyed to be walking out of minor surgery knowing that your injury is not life-threatening and just a surface wound expected to heal within a few weeks. If there is something to smile about in our troubled times, it's that one is still alive and kicking, or at least doing better than those unfortunate victims of gunfire who will be a lifelong paraplegic or sustain incurable trauma to the brain, and they deserve comfort and support from all of us rather than accusations of being crisis actors.
There are three immediate reasons photos of horrific wounds are not bandied about in public: emotional trauma to victim families and friends; the potential for encouraging more acts of terrorism; and because blood and gore are not needed to get across the seriousness of this issue.
Delusional Fantasies of the World as a Stage
There is another sort of brain damage that arises from a fixation on the obvious deceptions in the 9/11 incidents. Sixteen years and three presidential administrations later, some people - myself included - are showing signs of fatigue over every single criminal incident on the police blotter being called a false flag event. Dog catcher down the street? It must be Homeland Security about to perpetrate canine attacks on your neighborhood children. Get over this mania, it's worn out, tired and driving you insane. There happen to be actual crimes and terrorist actions being committed for various reasons, which law enforcement agencies may sometimes fumble due to inertia, bureaucratic red tape or simply because they were taken by surprise. Many types of criminal plots are nipped in the bud and therefore go unreported but some of the more calculated plans are bound to evade detection due to the law of statistics and probability.
Despite the fact that official coverup is the standard response to terror-related crimes, many, many eyewitness accounts from the Route 91 Harvest Festival have presented sufficient, credible evidence to blow the coverup away. Additionally, we have a solid timeline of events, recorded police radio traffic, conflicts among law enforcement agencies and recent background to indicate a calculated terrorist event aimed at putting political pressure on the Executive Office, State Department and Pentagon. Furthermore, it seems more than clear that the assault teams could easily have killed hundreds, if not thousands more people). Journalists are not bound by the same rules as lawmen and are expected to conduct independent investigations with professional competence. If someone cannot keep up with the process of investigative journalism, then please go back to watching the mindless plots of cable television and deluge of endless commercials. The Vegas massacre is complicated by the very fact of where it occurred and by the political effects it generates on the Middle East power balance as the wars in Syria and Iraq wind down.
The denials of gunshot killings have outraged many people who were caught in the crossfire and whose loved ones and friends are no longer with us. Given the tragedy for the survivors and families of the dead, it is grotesque to deny what happened, especially when the perpetrators have already announced that the next strike is going to be against San Francisco.
It is therefore not just insensitive to cast doubts on the pain of the victims, but nay-saying is stupid from a public security standpoint. Denial is helping the terrorists to escape and as such the deniers are essentially taking the side of terrorism. If that's the way it 's going to be, don't expect anyone to risk their lives to rescue an armchair theorist.
Graphic Violence in Media Imagery
In the Vietnam War, photojournalists sent home gut-wrenching images of the brutality of war, scenes like shot-to-pieces wounded US soldiers on stretchers, blown-apart bodies in the mud, the execution with gunshot to the head of an insurgent during the Tet Offensive, and a napalm-burnt girl running naked down a road in fear and pain.
Today, those sorts of graphic images cannot be published...not only due to the risk of lawsuits by the victims or surviving families who object to sensationalist displays of gore and pain that increase the newsstand sales of the mass media, but also because of concerns for media ethics in regard to commercial profiteering from bloodshed.
The ethical debate over gory images and compromising photos of prisoners that aid the hostage-takers, came to a head in another war situation, the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. Following the famous Blackhawk Down gun battle, the naked bodies of American Special Forces soldiers were dragged through the unpaved streets to the cheers and jeers of overjoyed urban mobs who kicked the corpses and threw garbage on them. Here, again, was a most shocking example of war pornography, guaranteed to be inspirational to would-be "freedom fighters" or "terrorists" however you want to define that sort of killer-in-waiting.
Photos of abused and defiled American dead were published by some so-called news magazines with male genitals exposed to the viewer and to the absolute horror of the families of those soldiers. This sort of frank depiction in publications show clearly that the outcome of Operation Gothic Serpent was anything but a false flag attack and that death in war is agonizingly real. But was the public display of abused corpses fair to the children, wives and mothers of those fallen soldiers? That goes to the core of 'media ethics'.
Commercial Exploitation of Victims of Violence
Mogadishu ended the debate over ethics until the issue resurfaced with the papparazzi photos of a shaken, bruised and blood-stained Princess Diana dying in the Paris Tunnel. From that point onward, the media worldwide (even the exploitative press like the National Enquirer) accepted self-imposed limits on graphic gore and sexualized violence. The media ethics controversy resurfaced in Hong Kong in the year 2000, when the tabloid press published upskirt photos of a suicidal woman, threatening to jump off a ledge. She jumped and the parasitic media leaped on the chance to follow up with photos of her smashed, bloody exposed body. Despite record newspaper and magazine sales, there was a backlash from journalism schools and the Christian Church against commercialization of violence and obscenity, during which I had no ethical qualms about arguing in favor of privacy and regard for family sensitivities, as well as the need to prevent copy-cat crimes.
In this time of mourning for the Las Vegas dead and seriously wounded, when the black threat of terrorism hangs over the country following the indiscriminate slaughter at the Orlando 'Pulse' and now the Route 91 Festival, discretion is advised. Social propriety does put a limit on the scope of the investigative journalism and critique of law enforcement, but that is a social reality that journalists need to abide by while tracking down the perpetrators and their rationale. In this hunt for the truth, sniping from the false flag wavers is an aid to the official cover-up that could help the criminally responsible get away to do it again.
Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor with the Japan Times newspapers in Tokyo and has reported on the Afghan War and the guerrilla campaign in Kashmir, attended the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and was a founding lecturer at new journalism schools in Hong Kong and Beijing.
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My photographs bear witness | James Nachtwey - YouTube
Are images of violence and death too distressing to publish—or too important to ignore?
Article by
Helen Lewis
Coming soon after the Islamic State group claimed the downing of the Russian plane in Egypt and deadly suicide bombings in Lebanon and Turkey, the Paris attacks appear to signal a fundamental shift in strategy toward a more global approach that experts suggest is likely to intensify
There was no blood, no violence, no panic. Just a little boy’s body washed ashore, one of thousands of victims of the refugee crisis unfolding along the borders of Europe. Yet the images of Alan Kurdi lying on a beach at Bodrum, Turkey, published in September, provoked fierce debate in newsrooms and on social media about whether the sight of a dead toddler was too distressing to show—or too important to ignore.
Several frames were available. Some showed Kurdi’s body face down on the beach; others showed a policeman cradling the boy in his arms. In France, Libération was criticized for not printing the photographs at all. In Germany, Bild received so many complaints for publishing a photo on its back page that it removed all images from its September 8 issue to make a point. “We must force ourselves to look,” wrote Julian Reichelt, editor in chief of bild.de. “Without pictures the world would be more ignorant, the needy even more invisible, more lost. … Photographs are the screams of the world.”
Liz Sly, Beirut bureau chief for The Washington Post, tweeted one of the photos—and was surprised by criticisms that she was violating Kurdi’s dignity. “That puzzled me because I spend every day looking at these images of death,” she says, “and anyone in the region does, anyone who covers Syria—at least half a dozen pictures of dead children every day. Perhaps we’re violating their dignity by not publicizing them and having them die in silence in the dark.”
With the ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq, frequent mass shootings in the U.S., and terrorist incidents such as the massacre in Paris, newsrooms are faced with constant decisions over the use of graphic or distressing images. What rules, if any, should news organizations follow when deciding whether to publish such images? Has the easy availability of graphic content on social media numbed audiences to tragedy? What effect does the production and consumption of such images have on journalists, editors, and their audiences? And does publishing emotive pictures like that of Alan Kurdi risk tipping stories from reportage into advocacy?
Yet the discussion is also familiar. Many of the most iconic news images of the last 100 years—a 9-year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam; the burned Iraqi soldier who died climbing from a car in the first Gulf War; Richard Drew’s “Falling Man” who jumped from a World Trade Center tower on 9/11; the dead passengers of the downed Malaysian Airlines plane in Ukraine—have been accompanied by debates about the ethics of their publication. Part of their power stems precisely from the fact that they show moments of pain and death usually hidden from view. It’s difficult to look at these images, and difficult to look away.
Photographers, of course, are on the front line of determinations about when, how, or whether to take these kinds of pictures. Gary Knight, co-founder of the VII Photo Agency, makes a distinction between taking distressing photographs and distributing them. Capturing an image and publishing it are separate decisions, he argues: “If you’re performing that role as a photographer or journalist, as some sort of witness or commentator, I think you need to record those things. But I don’t think that they need to be published.” Once the photograph is taken, Knight believes, a consultation needs to begin between the photographer and the editors. For Knight, the way an image is framed and publicized is just as important as the content of the image itself.
Perhaps the most persistent questions about how images of violence and death are framed are whether they dehumanize their subjects and whether they prioritize the suffering of certain groups over that of others. Michael Shaw, a California-based clinical psychologist and founder of the Reading The Pictures blog, calls this the dilemma of “the Western gaze”—a process by which deaths and disasters are unconsciously split into those that matter more and those that matter less.
In the wake of the November 13 terror attacks on Paris, social media users questioned why a bombing in Beirut on November 12 (which killed 43 people) did not receive the same level of media attention. “When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog stateofmind13.com. “Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.”
“Photographs are the screams of the world”
Alexey Furman, a Ukrainian photojournalist now studying for a master’s degree at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, felt a similar dynamic while covering the Euromaidan uprising and subsequent Russian annexation of the Crimea in 2014. He felt uneasy seeing American colleagues taking photographs of dead Ukrainian fighters. “As a photographer, I didn’t like or dislike [the photographs]. But as a citizen, there was a storm happening inside me … It was painful to see my people dead and just corpses there in the middle of a field, [photos] being taken by anyone.”
Rhonda Shearer, who runs iMediaEthics, a nonprofit site that investigates media ethics, says her organization’s investigation into images of the 2007 assassination of Pakistan leader Benazir Bhutto suggests Western media do treat dead Westerners differently. Many U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times, printed photographs from the Bhutto killing showing piles of dismembered corpses alongside a man wearing a brown jacket who was crying and gesturing. Although “Brown Jacket Man” was on the scene for more than an hour, iMediaEthics found that none of the Western journalists present discovered his name or if he was, as the captions later suggested, a “Bhutto supporter.” “If you transpose that onto an American scene,” Shearer says, “that would just never happen.”
In response to the iMediaEthics report, a photographer contacted Shearer to contest that assertion, pointing to the photographs of 9/11. But Shearer contends that very few images of dead Americans were published after that tragedy, the most graphic image in the mainstream media being Todd Maisel’s New York Daily News photograph of a severed hand. Images of people jumping from the twin towers were also rarely published in the U.S., and “people jumping,” Shearer says, “that’s clean shots compared with what I’m sure photographers have, which are the smashed bodies at the bottom of the World Trade Center, which is more what we saw in the Bhutto killing.”
Some argue that the cumulative effect of these editorial decisions is to perpetuate Western exceptionalism. Cultural critic David Shields, who analyzed about 1,000 front-page images of war from The New York Times for his book “War Is Beautiful,” says that “photo editors are looking for photos that reify received notions about war and battle and heroism and masculinity. It’s hard to resist the interpretation that this is the distribution of ideology by other means.” He points to recurring tropes—children juxtaposed with friendly, father-like soldiers or iterations of the Pietà from Christian art. “There is an ancient tradition of brutal and more truth-telling war photography,” Shields says. “If you only read The New York Times, you’d think war is heaven or, at worst, war is heck.”
In 2010, Time published an arresting cover image: Aisha, an Afghan teenager who had her nose and ears cut off by the Taliban. Kira Pollack, Time’s director of photography, explains that one of the considerations staffers took into account when debating whether to use the image was the effect on Aisha of becoming “iconic,” particularly since she still lived in Afghanistan at the time. “There are all these other things that go into these discussions,” Pollack says. “What happens when children see these pictures? That’s a conversation that we have at Time as well, because our audience is our families.”
The magazine published Aisha’s picture on the cover, with a provocative headline: “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” For some, that wording tipped the piece into advocacy. The picture and headline became an argument for continuing American military involvement in the region.
The Kurdi pictures also made a polemical point, even if an uncontroversial one: a call to action in the face of Europe’s refugee crisis. Many who defended publication of the images cited this moral imperative. Knight is unconvinced. “I’ve been making pictures like that all my life, and very rarely did any of them make a difference,” he says. When the European Journalism Observatory looked at pre- and post-Kurdi coverage of immigration in three newspapers in each of eight European countries, it saw that “positive humanitarian stories about migrants” rose after the photos ran, but within about a week had decreased to pre-Kurdi levels. However, a study by the Visual Social Media Lab, backed by Google, found that social media users did change their language after the picture was published—the majority switched from using “migrant” to “refugee,” and this effect persisted for at least two months.
The Post’s Sly sees the reaction to the Kurdi picture as an argument for the publication of more distressing images, not fewer. She’s disappointed that the “Caesar” images—which were smuggled out of Syria by a military policeman code-named Caesar, and which allegedly show torture victims of the Assad regime—were not published widely. “I’m not sure it helps you to understand how intrusive this war is if you’re not seeing how violent it is and you’re not sharing that sense of horror and outrage that the people in the region are,” Sly says.
Many journalists working in the Middle East, where images of death and violence are more common on TV and in other media, echo the point. “In places like Latin America and the Middle East, people are more open to seeing images of suffering,” says photographer Andrea Bruce, who has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s not labeled as an intrusion but more often proof of a wrongdoing by a government or military.”
While some experience being photographed as a violation, others see it as a validation—a crucial recognition of a wrong. In Ukraine, Furman recalls arriving in the village of Mykolaivka during fighting with pro-Russian separatists. An angry crowd that believed the Ukrainian government was responsible for shelling the village confronted him. A man grabbed him and took him to a bombed apartment building where a body lay in the rubble. “The community wanted me to get this picture out,” Furman says. “They wanted the world to know that this is what happened in their small town that no one ever talked about in international coverage.”
Jeff Bauman, who lost his legs in the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, made a similar point in The Guardian last year. Charles Krupa, the Associated Press photographer who took pictures of Bauman and his injuries as he was being rushed from the scene in a wheelchair, apologized for doing so. “I told Charlie that I understand now, like I didn’t then, that he was helping us that day, in the best way he knew how,” Bauman wrote. “He was showing the world the truth—that bombs tear flesh and smash bones—and making the tragedy real.”
The publication of graphic images from Syria has become particularly vexed as so few journalists are working in the region. Most of the images from the country are taken by activists and can be hard to verify and interpret. Others are straightforward propaganda from jihadist groups. ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) fighters film many of their killings in high definition, adding logos and graphics and distributing them through their online magazine, Dabiq, Twitter, and other social media.
ISIS videos follow an approach also used by the Taliban, which once banned photography but now has its own video production unit, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which runs its own TV station. Images of atrocities—and of civilians killed by Western military action—are key tools of propaganda and recruitment, according to Susie Linfield, a professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and author of “The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence.” The images can be especially effective because they are often broadcast to people who are illiterate, Linfield says, “who have no access to newspapers, so this is their main source of information, this constant flood of atrocity images.”
The ubiquity of graphic images has lent fresh impetus to worries that disturbing photographs undermine public support for military actions carried out in their name. Canadian photographer Paul Watson’s images of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 catalyzed President Bill Clinton’s decision to pull U.S. peacekeeping troops out of the country the next year. Osama bin Laden later said the unwillingness of the U.S. to tolerate military casualties demonstrated “[its] impotence and weaknesses.”
Discussions of the effects of graphic images tend to focus on those upset or offended by them and less so on those who might like them too much. In the wake of repeated mass shootings in the U.S., some journalists have expressed concern that media coverage could be exacerbating the phenomenon. A week before the Kurdi pictures began to circulate, social media was also the place where many saw the fatal shooting of Virginia news reporter Alison Parker and camera operator Adam Ward by a disgruntled former colleague. The shooting happened during a live television broadcast and was also filmed by the shooter himself, who was holding a camera just above his gun. Soon after the killings, he uploaded the footage to Twitter and Facebook. Both social networks had an auto-play feature, meaning that thousands of users ended up watching a snuff video without choosing to or having any warning about the content. Both social networks quickly deactivated the shooter’s accounts. The next day, stills from both Ward and the shooter’s videos appeared on front pages. In Britain, the tabloid The Sun used a frame that showed the moment he fired, the muzzle flash from the gun visible.
Linfield argues these images should not have been published. In October, Mother Jones published a cover story about efforts to stop the mass shootings. In a related article online, national affairs editor Mark Follman reflected on how news coverage of such incidents affected vulnerable young men, arguing that sensationalist reporting was both encouraging would-be killers to act and to make their crimes more spectacular. “Forensic psychologists have come to understand, by interviewing these people—the ones who survive—they know they are very aware of the media attention they will get,” Follman says. “It’s what they want. It’s a certain responsibility that the media has now that we know that, not to engage with that any more than we need to in order to report forensically for the public interest.”
Follman argues that media organizations need to make sure that photographs they publish of such killers and their crimes do not contribute to their self-mythologization. He contends that, in the case of the man who shot U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson in 2011, it would be better to use a neutral yearbook photograph rather than the mug shot that was seized on by the press. “There’s an argument to be made not only that it’s not necessary, but it’s potentially damaging the people who emulate [him],” Follman says. “They see that this guy is memorialized with this deranged, smug grin on his face.” Similarly, he suggests journalists think carefully before using images of the gunman who killed nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, waving a Confederate flag and wearing white nationalist symbols, taken from his social media profiles. Some argue we should go even further: following a shooting in Roseburg, Oregon that left 10 dead, including the gunman, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin refused to name the perpetrator when briefing the media. “I will not give him the credit he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act,” he told reporters. Several media organizations have followed suit, with The Washington Post publishing on December 5 a long read about one of the Roseburg survivors without once mentioning the gunman’s name.
The lack of context on social media adds a new wrinkle to the debate about publishing graphic photographs
The use of graphic images should prompt many questions in a responsible newsroom. Is the image’s news value or public interest greater than the potential negative impact on the subject? Does it bolster an existing narrative about a conflict? If so, does it do so consciously and fairly? Does it dehumanize its subjects or draw the world’s attention to their plight? Could the image be used as propaganda or drive a vulnerable person to commit a crime? If so, is it still essential to the story and therefore should it be published anyway?
There are no easy answers to these questions, and even highly ethical, conscientious journalists will disagree over particular cases. Bradley Secker, who has worked in Iraq, Syria, and Greece and been published in outlets including The Independent, The New Republic, and The National in the United Arab Emirates, believes news organizations can address these concerns in part by giving audiences as much context as possible alongside the photographs. “As long as the image captions are accurate and the image itself hasn’t been manipulated, there is little room for propaganda,” Secker says.
Reading The Pictures’s Shaw cites the Pulitzer-winning work of Craig F. Walker, who spent a year photographing an Iraq War veteran for The Denver Post and accompanied the images with extended captions. This is a way not just to mitigate the reductive nature of photos, Shaw argues, but to create a richer, more nuanced form of storytelling. In contrast, he criticizes website photo galleries because they strip away context.
Social media complicates the equation even further. Should a graphic image be appended to a tweet, when there is so little opportunity to provide context? Should social media companies disable auto-play for videos to avoid inadvertently displaying snuff videos in people’s timelines?
For Time’s Pollack, discussions about graphic or distressing images matter because those images often resonate most with audiences. Jerome Sessini’s haunting pictures of the dead passengers of MH17, a plane shot down over Ukraine, were the most viewed on Time’s Lightbox section last year, attracting nearly 12 million pageviews and 900,000 unique visitors.
The appeal of Sessini’s photographs highlights an uncomfortable truth: For all the outcry, there is clearly an audience for these kinds of images. As a photographer, Gary Knight argues that audiences need to ask themselves their motivations for viewing such images, just as the media must interrogate its reasons for publishing them.
Knight tells the story of returning to London from an assignment in Bosnia in 1997 and being asked by Newsweek to cover the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, which was initially blamed on paparazzi pursuing her car through Paris. Outside Buckingham Palace, “I got a lot of grief from the public for being a photographer,” he recalls. “I was blamed, collectively, for killing Princes Diana. And I thought, these are the women who are buying the Sun and the Mirror and the Mail, and all these newspapers that were hounding Princess Diana.”
Barbie Zelizer, professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “About to Die: How News Images Move the Public,” suggests that, despite new technologies that make graphic images easier to capture and share, the controversy hasn’t changed much over the years. “The images we are getting, and the debates which greet them, are very much the same as they’ve always been,” she says. She offers a simple, though far from infallible, test in deciding whether to publish. Is the photo central to the story? If the story cannot be told without it, the image must be published, no matter how distressing it might be, she argues.
Alexey Furman believes that graphic images only work if they make the reader want to know more about them, rather than instantly turn the page. “We have to produce images that the world will be ready to spend some time with, and read the captions, and look again, and observe.”
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How Photographers Change The Way You Feel About War - YouTube
Should the brutal reality of war be broadcasted to the American general public? This question dates back to World War 1, World War 2, and also the Vietnam War. The same questions are being asked with the War in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are many reasons why war images have been censored such as the enemy knowing the location of our soldiers, images of our wounded and dead soldiers being seen as disrespect to their honor, and do the American people want to see blood, decapitated and burned bodies being broadcasted in their living room on the five o clock news. Is the government shielding the American public from the brutality of warfare so public opinions on war aren’t drastically altered or changed? These are all great questions that have been asked for decades.
Yes, images of war should be censored to shield the American public from the harsh realities that result from warfare. Imagine turning on your television set to channel 7 news and the first image you recognize is a fallen American hero who died fighting for his/her country. This brave men and women sacrificed their life for the honor of this country. The disrespect of showing their lifeless body is shameful. That deceased soldier is somebody’s son, daughter, friend, nephew, niece, or grandchild. Would you want the last image of you posted to be of you suffering and dyeing? I don’t think so.
Giphy
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3 years ago
War censorship goes far back to World War 1, World War 2, and the Vietnam War. The American Military had complete control over any publications that were to be reported. Such images as soldiers drinking, lounging around, weapons, dead, burned, or decomposed bodies we censored to shield the American public from the horrid occurrences. The American citizens also didn’t want to see these images. Politicians were afraid showing these graphic images would change the opinion of those who supported warfare, which was a great majority as patriotism was at an all-time high.
world-war-2.wikia.com
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3 years ago
Images of war weren’t the only forms of publications that were also censored and banned during our historical time of warfare. Letters from soldiers to their loved ones were banned out of fear that valuable information could somehow wind up in the enemies hand. Soldiers locations could be compromised, strategic information revealed. Just like photographs, letters would reveal the harsh reality of war and the military didn’t want the opinion on war to be changed. How would you feel if you were a member of the Armed Forces and you couldn’t write home to your loved ones who you may never see again?
kevinspraggettonchess.wordpress.com
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3 years ago
The phrase "loose lips sinks ships" is a phrase that could describe the censorship of the reality of war. With hundreds of thousands of service men and women and hundreds of press one slip up can upend the entire effort of the war. Protecting the ultimate agenda of the war and the American troops from any kind of danger is the far most the most important protocol of war. While casualties do occur, one leak could see the entire platoon or fort wiped out like a genocide.
brandnoise.typepad.com
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3 years ago
Many news station also refrain from broadcasting catastrophic images of war. Such news stations such as CNN and Fox would enrage viewers if images of our wounded troops were broadcasted all over the world. With the news being accessible to children as young as five, would you tune in to the nightly news if you knew that bodies of wounded and dead troops would be displayed? I know I wouldn't. It's morally wrong to display these images I feel. What if that persons family saw this image as the last image they seen of their loved ones? It's not right. While media journalism is permitted in warzones, they are restricted and are on strict guidelines when it comes to reporting
Giphy
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3 years ago
So in conclusion, the images of warfare should be censored not only because it’s morally wrong but it can prevail to bigger problems in the war zone. Locations could be compromised, important information can be leaked, which can lead to even more casualties. While military guidelines have changed since the world wars and the Vietnam War, I feel even back then the government was right to censor these images. Soldiers not being able to write home is ridiculous and I don’t agree with, war censorship is good for the American people because reality is harsh. If you would like to experience war, sign up for the military. God bless America and the censorship on images of war but most importantly God bless our braves troos
In recent decades the portrayal of war violence in Western media has become more regulated and less anticipated by audiences. The use of certain graphic images or detailed content concerning war is for the most part highly censored due to underlying ethical issues, as well as potential consequences this kind of mass exposure could have on audiences. In contrast, other audiences that are exposed to non-Western media outlets such as Al-Jazeera “quite reasonably [expect] gore and dead bodies to be part of war coverage” (Friedersdorf, 2013). Knowing that “scholars agree that foreign media in general are more willing to show graphic images”, we are forced to question to what extent media coverage on war should be censored(Friedersdorf, 2013).
In Conor Friedersdorf’s article What's With the U.S. Media's Aversion to Graphic Images? , the author talks about how American media tends to “sanitize almost all death” and compares pro-life abortion activists’ methods of using the most graphic content possible to gain supporters, to America’s restraint to exposing images of war in fear of the public’s reaction. He further goes on to compare Western and foreign media, touches on media dilemmas during certain wars such as the Vietnam and Iraqi War, and finally looks at how revealing this kind of information could potentially affect audiences. The author argues that despite the fact the portrayal of violent images in the media “aren’t enough to stop killings”, it is enough to impact the public and subsequently provide a greater understanding of war and the news itself.
One main Western journalistic value is to consider limitations of harm; this means that journalists have to take into account whether the information gathered should be reported based on how it affects society. Negative consequences should be considered when releasing information, and the dilemma between how this could harm or benefit society should be the basis of journalists’ decision. The outcome is most important. Although journalists may be trying to protect their audiences by censoring themselves, there are many disadvantages to a having a mainly heavily censored corporate media system. The usual intent behind portraying violence in the media would either be to try and broadcast stories most effectively and precisely, and in other cases, to shock the audience into understanding the depths of war, which one could rarely interpret through the words of a reporter. Because of Western media’s fear of overexposure and harm to society, if all reporters and news outlets had decided to expose the public to these images of war and violence, the public would initially have a strong reaction and the “dissemination of graphic images would backfire” (Friedersdorf, 2013). The goal of showing people these images would be to intentionally shock them into a better understanding of the situation, and to cause the public to give importance to these often neglected topics. Contrary to foreign countries that do not have such a strongly censored media, “such photos might give rise to opposing responses” (Friedersdorf, 2013). This means that because of the Western media’s plethoric withholding of information and images, according to Friedersdorf, people’s responses would be heightened to the point where they would either “call for peace” see it as a “cry for revenge” or experience “bemused awareness” because of exposure to this kind of content. A recent example of a strong public reaction would be of violent photographs that surfaced from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These images mainly depicted prison torture, as well as many other human rights violations committed by the United States forces. These images caused an extreme shock to the public, and sparked a national debate over prisoner abuse.
What seems to be the best solution for Western media is to gradually incorporate not-so-graphic war content into the news so that it does not cause such strong public reactions, but also not to take displaying violence so lightly. It has to be understood that this could potentially mean normalizing scenes of violence in the media. There are many possible issues with normalizing violence, doing this would eventually end up desensitizing the audience, “give the false impression that society is becoming more violent”, and would “provoke an emotional response” or ”distract from the history and context” of the image (Sarah Waurechen). Ultimately, the biggest issue associated to diffusing this content is that all of this information could largely contribute to the dehumanizing and mere objectification of people during war. Once journalists decide to publish the information they have gathered, this news, violent in nature, turns people in the images into “works of art, tossed out to be gobbled up by the world that did them in” (Theodor Adorno).
While taking both of these perspectives into account, the media’s choice to reveal certain information or not should solely depend on how it could potentially benefit society. In this case, the best solution would be to expose audiences to certain images when it is extremely important and valuable to delivering a story. If this is not done people will never truly be informed on what is happening. The use of words like casualties and collateral damage are extremely effective in attenuating information and ultimately ends up undermining the true importance and seriousness of stories being reported on. Certain information being distributed to the public is extremely essential in truly explaining what is happening, as well as giving weight and importance to different circumstances throughout world. According to Friedersdorf, it is to “varying degrees, [this] material [has] an impact on public thinking”. Without this violent content, reporters’ words, and even worse, euphemisms are not enough to explain the depth of what is going on. Nonetheless the use of violence within the media should not be taken lightly and if used only when it is a necessity, should remain most effective.
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The Conscientious Lens - A Conversation between Ron Haviv and Sebastian Junger - YouTube
Images like this have rarely appeared in the world's media
This is a war the Bush administration does not want Americans to see. From the beginning, the U.S. government has attempted to censor information about the Iraq war, prohibiting photographs of the coffins of U.S. troops returning home and refusing as a matter of policy to keep track of the number of Iraqis who have been killed. President Bush has yet to attend a single funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq.
Photo Gallery
Click here to view the accompanying photo gallery on Salon.com. But first a few words of warning: these pictures are extremely graphic and disturbing.
To be sure, this see-no-evil approach is neither surprising nor new. With the qualified exception of the Vietnam War, when images of body bags appeared frequently on the nightly news, American governments have always tightly controlled images of war. There is good reason for this. In war, a picture really is worth a thousand words. No story about a battle, no matter how eloquent, possesses the raw power of a photograph. And when it comes to war's ultimate consequences -- death and suffering -- there is simply no comparison: a photo of a dead man or woman has the capacity to unsettle those who see it, sometimes forever. The bloated corpses photographed by Mathew Brady after Antietam remain in the mind, their puffy, shocked faces haunting us like an obscene truth almost 150 years after the soldiers were cut down.
"War is hell," said Gen. Sherman, and everyone dutifully agrees. Yet the hell in Iraq is almost never shown. The few exceptions -- the charred bodies of American contractors hanging from a bridge in Fallujah, the blood-spattered little girl wailing after her parents were killed next to her -- only prove the rule. Governments keep war hidden because it is hideous. To allow citizens to see its reality -- the shattered bodies, the wounded children, the incomprehensible mayhem -- is to risk eroding popular support for it. This is particularly true with wars that have less than overwhelming popular support to begin with. In the case of Vietnam, battlefield images played an important role in turning the tide of public opinion. And in Iraq, a war whose official justification has turned out to be false, and which a majority of the American people now believe to have been a mistake, the administration would prefer that these grim images never be seen.
But the 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.
There are a number of reasons why the media has shied away from running graphic images from Iraq. Some are simple logistics: There are very few photographers in Iraq. Freelance reporter and photographer Mitchell Prothero, a Salon contributor, estimates there are "maybe a dozen or two Western photographers" in Iraq, in addition to Iraqi and Arab stringers, who do most of the work for newswires. Ten or 20 photographers trying to cover a country the size of Sweden, under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions, are unlikely to be on the scene when violence erupts.
Moreover, most photographers are embedded with U.S. troops, a situation that imposes its own limits. Military regulations prevent photographers from publishing photographs of dead or wounded soldiers until their families have been notified, which can diminish the news value of the photographs. And although embed rules allow photographers to take pictures of dead or wounded troops, the reality on the ground can be different. Soldiers do not want photographers -- especially ones they aren't comfortable with -- taking pictures of their dead or wounded buddies. This is understandable, but it can result in de facto censorship.
One photographer, who requested anonymity because he didn't want to jeopardize his ongoing relationship with the U.S. military, told Salon, "I've had unit commanders tell me flat out that if anybody gets wounded on patrol, you can't take any pictures of them. Nearly every time I've landed at [a medevac] scene, guys have yelled at me, 'Get the fuck away from me. Don't take my friend's picture. Get back on the helicopter.' Part of me understands that. I am a stranger to them. And they are very emotional. Their friend has been badly hurt or wounded, and they've probably all just been shot at 15 minutes before. I totally understand that, although it is a violation of embed rules."
But it isn't just the troops. Editors in the States are reluctant to run graphic photographs. There are various reasons for this. Perhaps the most important is taste: Many publications think graphic images are just too disturbing. Business considerations doubtless also play a role, although few editors would admit that; graphic images upset some readers and can scare off advertisers. (Salon pulled all advertising, except house ads, off the pages of this gallery.) And there are political considerations: Supporters of the war often accuse the media of playing up bad news at the expense of more positive developments. To run images of corpses is to risk being criticized of antiwar bias. When "Nightline" ran photographs of the faces of all the U.S. troops who had been killed in Iraq, conservative groups were enraged and accused the network of harming morale. Not every publisher is anxious to walk into this kind of trouble.
The reluctance of American publications to run shocking images contrasts with the European press. "In my experience and in conversations with other people who've been doing this a lot longer than me, American publications shy away from extremely graphic material, compared to European ones," says Prothero. "I don't know whether the American audience reacts more strongly against seeing that over the breakfast table. I do know, anecdotally, that many very talented photographers, on staff, have taken pictures that have not run in magazines or newspapers. Maybe it's not a conscious decision but American publications very much shy away from showing casualties of U.S. troops on the ground. I think they're afraid the American public will freak out on them for showing dead American boys."
Photographer Stephanie Sinclair's unforgettable photograph of a 6-year-old Iraqi girl killed by an American cluster bomb, which appears in the gallery, originally ran in the Chicago Tribune. Robin Daughtridge, the Tribune's deputy director of photography, told Salon that after the photographs first came in, "the news editor was worried about running them without an accompanying story." Others in the newsroom thought the photographs "were too graphic, and too much, because we generally don't run tight pictures of dead bodies. We had run pictures of dead Iraqi soldiers and a dead bus driver before, so there was a precedent for running them, but we don't take it lightly." They ended up calling the paper's editor in chief, Ann Marie Lipinski, who assigned a reporter to do a piece on cluster bombs and their legacy.
Ultimately, Daughtridge said, politics didn't enter into the decision: "It was more about the fact that if we're going to show this death up close and personal, we better have a story behind it. All of us in the newsroom are trying to tell the story and letting the readers make up their own minds." She added, "I felt proud of what we did that day. All of this stuff that you hear about happening to families in Iraq doesn't really hit home until you see that picture of the little girl."
For her part, Sinclair praised the Tribune for running the photo and the story. But, she said, "some of the publications I've worked for didn't run a lot of the Iraqi civilian stuff, the graphic pictures, the emotional pictures. I found that the Iraqi civilian story was really hard to get published in U.S. publications. And I worked for many. I don't know why. I think they're looking at their readership and they think their readers want to know about American troops, since they can relate to them more. They think that's what the audience wants."
Sinclair also noted that American readers and viewers get only a sanitized view of the horrific consequences of suicide bombings. "A lot of the bombing stuff that you see is really toned down. To be honest, sometimes it should be. God, it's relentless. It's hard to look at. People have no idea what's happening in Iraq. You wonder, even as a photographer, if you're being gratuitous by photographing some of this. At the same time, as horrific as it is to see, people should know how horrific it is to live it every day. We should feel some sort of responsibility to make sure we have the best possible grasp of what's happening there."
It is because we believe that the American people are not getting a look at the reality of the Iraq war, for Americans and Iraqis alike, that we decided to run this photo gallery. It is no secret that Salon has published many more pieces questioning and challenging the Iraq war than supporting it. But that is not why we think it is important that these images be seen. We would have run them even if we supported the war. The reason is simple: The truth should be told. People should know the truth about war. Before a nation decides to go to war, it should know what its consequences are.
There is no way for any journalist, whether reporter or photographer, to capture the multifaceted reality of Iraq. But all of the journalists I have spoken to who have worked in Iraq say that the blandly optimistic pronouncements made by the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq are completely false. A picture of a dead child only represents a fragment of the truth about Iraq -- but it is one that we do not have the right to ignore. We believe we have an ethical responsibility to those who have been killed or wounded, whether Iraqis, Americans or those of other nationalities, not to simply pretend that their fate never happened. To face the bitter truth of war is painful. But it is better than hiding one's eyes.
Additional reporting by Kevin Berger, Page Rockwell and Aaron Kinney.
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Don McCullin on war, humanity and journalism today - YouTube
Censoring Images and Videos of the War in Iraq for American Society
By Maurice Smith
In war, a picture is worth a thousand words. No story about a battle has the same impact as a photograph. When it comes to death and suffering, there is simply no comparison: a photo of a dead man or woman will leave a horrific effect on a person’s mind. Generals in America’s Army will agree that war is hell. However, the hell in Iraq is almost never shown in America’s media. Americans are censored to what the government wants them to know. United States citizens only know what the American government tells them. Governments keep war hidden because war is hideous. Allowing citizens to see the reality of war is to risk the American public’s support. Also, allowing citizens to see the reality of war might cause damaging psyhcological responses (Fisk, 2003). But is the American public sheltered too much? Should they know the truth about what is happening in Iraq? The purpose of this paper is to reach a conclusion about whether or not the government should censor images of war for the American society. Three specific areas will be examined: censorship of the media, psychological responses to censoring images, and public opinion concerning the war.
Censorship in the Media
In times of war, a government may place a higher priority on the information released to the public. This will result in policies limiting public access to information that is considered too sensitive or inappropriate. No one wants our nation to be run as strictly as Saddam Hussein did Iraq, but America too is slowly becoming a controlled society (Seib, 2004). In the United States, the first amendment of the Constitution guarantees a free public press for its citizens. The first amendment rights are also extended to members of news gathering organizations, and their reporting in newspapers and magazines and televsion. It also extends to news gathering, and processes involved in obtaining information for public distribution. By having this right the media should be able to print, report, and even gather news about any subject they want as long as it’s true. So, if the media has the right to print truthful stories and pictures why aren’t they?
Why are the Images Censored in America society?
Why have the media shied away from showing graphic images and videos of the war in Iraq? News executives still are worrying a bit too much about what the public's reaction might be to blood and gore. The images that are too explicit will change Americans way of thinking about the American government. There are some journalists that are embedded with U.S troops and have exclusive information and images that some Americans may find offensive. These embedded journalists follow American troops around in Iraq and can record information as long as they follow the rules. Although the rules allow them to photograph dead or wounded soldiers some Americans may be offended by the images, especially if the have family members fighting in Iraq (Roberts, 2007).
Some soldiers may not want photographers taking pictures of their dead or wounded buddies. Also, military personel do not want pictures showing American soliders involved in questionable acts. For example, graphic photos of abused Iraqi prisoners were released on CBS’s 60 Minutes news show on April 28, 2004. The footage shows US military personnel forcing nude Iraqi prisoners to simulate sex acts. Others were made to form a human pyramid. One photo shows a man badly beaten, and another shows a corpse. Sexual humiliation may be the least of the indignites inflicted on some of the prisoners. Several of the scenes show an American woman in uniform, gesturing lewdly and prancing in front of the hooded, nude Iraqi prisoners. After the release of these photos Bush strategists feared that the American public might lose heart towards their own U.S soldiers. They feared that the opinions formed after this act would be shocking (Seib, 2004). There are over 700 men and women United States soldiers killed in Iraq that have not been covered by the news in the U.S (Robinson, 2007). The White House has forbidden television coverage of the return of their coffins to the Dover Air Force Base, where many of the military funerals are covered.
The Effects of War Images on Public Opinion
During wartime, media coverage and images shown can have important consequences for public opinion on the conflict. In the most basic sense, the mass media provide information that individuals use to form their opinions. The restrictions that journalists have to follow diminish the public’s ability to form its own opinion. The public will form an opinion based on the information that is fed to them, but if the information is very biased then the opinion is biased. This is particularly true with wars that have less overwhelming popular support to begin with (Fisk, 2003). Just like the war in Vietnam, battlefield images played an important role in changing sides of the public’s opinion. The majority of the American people now believe the Vietnam War to have been a mistake; the administration would have preferred that these grim images never be seen (Seib, 2004).
But the media is also responsible for hindering the Iraq war, at times making it almost invisible. Most American publications have been reluctant to run graphic war images. Almost no photographs of the 3,000 U.S. troops who have been killed to date in Iraq have appeared in U.S. publications (Seib, 2002). According to the New York Times David Carr (2005) found a survey constructed in May 2005 by James Rainey, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, who 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. This goes back to Vietnam war that negative images make for negative opinions.
Potential Psychological Responses to Censoring Images
Censorship has the effect of threatening the freedoms that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is designed to protect. The threats to freedom often backfire by intensifying the interest in the freedom being threatened (Pollack, 2002). There is a theory called Psychological Reactance Theory. This is an attempt at explaining people’s actions to threats to freedoms. This theory means that when people feel that their freedom to choose an action is threatened, they get an unpleasant feeling called reactance. This unpleasant state triggers a variety of psychological responses. This can motivate them to perform the threatened behavior, thus proving that their free will has not been compromised. If it is possible to literally restore the lost freedom, the person will move toward restoring that freedom in some fashion. In situations where it is impossible for the lost freedom to be restored, responses to reactance take other forms, such as improved interest in the object of the freedom lost or some other form of attitude change in the direction consistent with lost or threatened freedom (Brehm, 1966).
Research has shown that Reactance is also a result of censoring images of the war. An individual feels that the censor is attempting to persuade or force him or her to adopt a particular idea on a topic by prohibiting coverage to an alternative position, thus attempting to limit the freedom to think and feel as he or she chooses (Brehm, 1966). For example, the images of Fallujah were shown across the world. These images contained burned soldiers that were beaten and hung over a bridge in Fallujah by Iraqi refugees. Though these images were brutal and horrific most publishers said they decided on the least graphic photos they could find. Viewings of these photos may result in psychological reactance. The power of images is recognized by the government, which helps explain the punitive way they have treated the cameramen in Iraq. There have been incidents of the cameramen being harassed by the U.S military in Iraqi. The U.S military is somehow convinced that the photographers are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is certainly possible that the pictures coming out of Iraq have greatly contributed to public disillusion with the war in Iraq (Roberts, 2007).
The Analytical Conclusion
The goal of this paper is to provide information on the censorship of the images of the war in Iraq. The three areas focused on were censorship of the media, psychological responses to censoring images, and public opinion concerning the war. Saddam Hussein said that “a controlled press is a responsible press.”(Fisk, 2003). The United States does not want to control or censoring images of war. An attitude like Hussein might sway our nation to a dictatorship. Censoring information so Americans won’t know the truth will drive more citizens to thinking the way that the government wants us to think, which is the goal of a totalitarian type of government. This is not the foundation of thinking our country was based on: we should know the truth about the war in Iraq. This means the public opinion about the war is no different than the American government, which is exactly how they want it to be.
Censorship should not be accepted as a form of social policy; America needs to know what is really happening with the troops in Iraq so that the opinions of Americans are not tainted with the government’s policy. Our government should be less concerned with negative public opinion against the war and more concerned with truth in reporting in the actual events occurring in Iraq. The only images or reports that should be censored are those that affect the safety of soldiers and military strategies.
Censorship is often done in an attempt to protect American citizens from a negative psychological response. Based on the Psychological Reactance Theory, people will create their own truth if they feel threatened by lack of knowledge because of censorship. By allowing images of the war in Iraq, Americans citizens can choose to avoid seeing the images or watch them and form their own opinions. Disclaimers warning of violent or graphic images can be given prior to broadcasting. Censorship takes away Americans basic right to truth.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: The Reality Of Life, And Those That Shield Themselves And Others From It Swami -- Wednesday, 13-Jan-2021 05:52:20
