Independent Media in a Time of War
Posted on July 07, 2004
Just finished watching a 29 minute documentary critiquing the American mainstream media's "march to war" and war coverage called Independent Media in a Time of War.
A speech by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman spliced with independent images of civilian casualties and flashy CNN, MSNBC and FOX graphics touting "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and "Target Iraq". Most interesting for me was the comparison between CNN and CNN International when the statue of Saddam was pulled down. For American consumption on CNN video and images of Saddam's statue being toppled was shown over and over again all day, while over at CNN International a spilt screen was showing the scene from Baghdad on one side and photos of Iraqi civilian casualties and injuries on the other half. Personally I was watching CNNj and didn't see any split screen during coverage on that day.
(Goodman): Some of you may have heard the hour discussion we had with CNN's Aaron Brown and we were asking him a lot of questions like "Where are the pictures of casualties in the U.S. media"?
AARON BROWN: I think there are actually legitimate questions here about have we over sanitized this?
AMY GOODMAN: And he said, "well some of them are tasteless". And we said, "well, war is tasteless". I was speaking at St. Mark's Church in New York and I talked about how Al Jazerra shows all these casualties pictures and a journalist came up to me afterwards from Berlin and said, "It's not just Al Jazeera that's showing these. All over Europe we see them day and night. It's just here in the United States that you don't see them". And so we asked Aaron Brown, "Why don't they show some of the shots", you know CNN was kicked out of Baghdad and he said "it's tough to get those shots". You have no trouble taking Al Jazeera's footage of the bombs over Baghdad, the kind-of fireworks display that we saw that night scape, but when it came to taking their pictures of casualties. Well, he said, "they're tasteless".
I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, we saw people's limbs sheered off, we saw the kids blown apart, for one week war would be eradicated. Instead what we see in the U.S. media and it's just quite astounding, it's the video war game. Those gray-grainy photographs with a target on them looking down but you don't see, we don't see those people as the targets on the ground.
AARON BROWN: I think there are actually legitimate questions here about have we over sanitized this?
AMY GOODMAN: And he said, "well some of them are tasteless". And we said, "well, war is tasteless". I was speaking at St. Mark's Church in New York and I talked about how Al Jazerra shows all these casualties pictures and a journalist came up to me afterwards from Berlin and said, "It's not just Al Jazeera that's showing these. All over Europe we see them day and night. It's just here in the United States that you don't see them". And so we asked Aaron Brown, "Why don't they show some of the shots", you know CNN was kicked out of Baghdad and he said "it's tough to get those shots". You have no trouble taking Al Jazeera's footage of the bombs over Baghdad, the kind-of fireworks display that we saw that night scape, but when it came to taking their pictures of casualties. Well, he said, "they're tasteless".
I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, we saw people's limbs sheered off, we saw the kids blown apart, for one week war would be eradicated. Instead what we see in the U.S. media and it's just quite astounding, it's the video war game. Those gray-grainy photographs with a target on them looking down but you don't see, we don't see those people as the targets on the ground.
I highly, highly recommend you take the time to watch this. (requires Real Player)
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