according to the project for excellence in journalism's news coverage index, coverage of the wars in iraq and afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all american print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last september. collective television stories now add up to about 4 minutes A WEEK. was the 4000 death toll count anybody's lead story last week? nope. just another day in the desert. far cry from the blood and guts that spilled onto american dinner plates with cronkite and vietnam, eh? despite the admin's peacocking about the success of the surge, last year was our bloodiest in iraq, with over 900 dead, and last month the worst of the year thus far.
most editors and producers put it down to "iraq fatigue". readers and viewers weary of what looks to be calcified entrenchment, and who are more affected at home by foreclosure follies and four bucks a gallon at the pump. my pointy-headedness leans towards media outlets which prefer not to run breathless accounts of last night's "dancing with the stars" voting, but instead feel an implied contract to impart the *news*. even these guys admit that the military makes it increasingly onerous for the press to do its job, which is showing soldiers doing theirs. from the beginning, we were told to honor the men and women fighting overseas, but where is the honor for the fallen, whose flag-draped coffins are brought home under secrecy and silence? at all military bases, especially at dover which is the receiving hub for the dead, there is a complete prohibition on any photographing of "movement of remains at any point." one lesson our block-head-in-command did learn was the power of images. a refusal to submit his wars to the "dover test" proves that handily. his dressing up in costume on that aircraft carrier crowing "mission accomplished" (how many years ago was that?) still sears my brain.reagan, carter, bush the elder and clinton all attended memorial or funeral services for exceptionally horrible losses. shrub has given up golf.
with the pentagon's iron-fisted ham-hands, it is no wonder that some of the wars' most iconic images were leaked -- those from abu ghraib. the naked human pyramids, the snarling dogs, lynndie england with a guy on a leash and megan ambuhl with her trademark thumbs-up, even flashed reflexively over an ice-packed corpse.
a few weeks back, i watched erol morris' "standard operating procedure." what struck me most was the youth and ignorance of most of the players. (charles graner remains in a military prison, so could not be interviewed.) kids from way-out-nowhere let loose in a "lord of the flies" environ. at the time, england was 20. none of these kids were our best or brightest by a long shot. they were given not-so-ambiguous orders to "break" prisoners in preparation for interrogation. most of the men being held had been netted in street sweeps, wrong place wrong time for them. can we imagine the horror of being a baker or taxi-driver headed to work in your war-torn town, thrown in jail, guilty only of being an iraqi? subjected to vile humiliations, bondage stress-positions, sleep and food dep for days upon days?
it was the miligram experiment once again writ large, with digital pictures and hand-held video as shocking proof. to clean it up, a few kids went to prison and nary a big-shot stepped forward for the shameful accountability for this moral stain.
stricter rules came down on soldiers' access to the internet and the owning of cameras.
general john a. logan, a veteran of bull run and vicksburg in the union army, a fierce proponent of a volunteer army and one of the men primarily credited for coming up with the memorial day holiday wrote long ago that both the glories and the consequences of war needed to be shared by all. he warned against “the dangers of confining military knowledge to a comparatively small number of citizens, constituting the select few who may hold the destinies of the country in their hands.”
we go from this:
if in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free” ~~ franklin d. roosevelt
to this:
“the function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.” ~~ a.j. liebling
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