I can’t help wondering about the rationale being offered for keeping the Al Jazeera footage of the captured U.S. soldiers off the air in this country. Apparently the effort to keep us from seeing these images goes further than that, too; at Yellow Times they are running the following notice: “The pictures of U.S. POWs and Iraqi civilian casualties has been censored by our hosting provider. Therefore, we cannot show these pictures. They also forced us to remove pictures of Iraqi casualties. Our site was shut down for an hour until we removed the pictures. You can see the pictures at our affiliate site here: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0303/S00212.htm.”

Over at ArabNews, they have a page of stills from the Al Jazeera footage titled Pictures US Media will not show; elsewhere, they use a still from the video in a news story titled Day of Setbacks for US.

All of this raises several questions in my mind. Why are the images not being shown? I could see commercial news outlets shying away from doing so on the grounds that the images would be too disturbing for an American audience, and they wouldn’t want to hurt their ratings (though you could argue that their duty as a news organization should trump such concerns, given the issues involved), but that wouldn’t explain Yellow Times’ Internet provider (VORTECHHOSTING.COM, orlando, fl) shutting their site down until the pictures had been removed. Maybe that could be justified as a standard response to posting others’ copyrighted material in violation of an Acceptable Use Policy, but I’d still wonder about whether the ISP was acting on complaints it had received, or what. (Update: See the comments, below, for a copy of the email their tech support folks sent in response to my asking them about it.) You could argue that these images should not be shown out of respect for the POWs (and dead soliders’) families, but you’d have to balance that against the interest of a democratic society in having an accurate picture of the costs of the war, such that informed decisions could be made about it.

Anyway, a lot of those questions are effectively moot, at least for the subset of the population getting its information from the net, given its dumb-in-the-middle design, which makes it pretty darn hard to keep people from seeing things you don’t want them to see. But I can see where this could definitely raise some hackles on the part of those who view ready access to such information as being very much a bug, rather than a feature.

Some of these issues are summed up quite nicely by an editorial at ArabNews.com: Lies, Lies, and More Lies (catchy title, that), which points the finger at Donald Rumsfeld, claiming he has bullied CNN, Fox, and MSNBC into keeping the images off the air because they are “propaganda” in violation of the Geneva Convention. Deep, murky waters we’re swimming in here. When those news outlets quote Iraqi government officials saying the infidels are being driven back by the heroic resistance, that’s obviously propaganda, too, but Rumsfeld apparently doesn’t feel like he needs to take personal steps to keep it off the air; he assumes that a reasonably intelligent audience will compare that information to the other information they have available, and conclude that the Iraqi officials are blowing smoke. But the footage of US POWs is different, because, well, it’s true, and it’s much more damaging to the Bush administration’s effort to keep public support for the war as high as possible.

So I can certainly see why Rumsfeld would want to keep us from seeing it. But that doesn’t mean he’s right. And in the context of ready access to non-US information sources, he loses. At least for now, and at least for those of us whose media are new enough to actually work the way information sources are supposed to in an open, democratic society.

This entry was posted by jbc on Monday, March 24th, 2003 at 1:23 am and is filed under the_media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.