Free Press Routinely Censors Photos of the Fallen

[oxbow]

Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20050521/ts_latimes/unseenpicturesuntoldstories

The young soldier died like so many others, ambushed while on patrol in Baghdad. Medics rushed him to a field hospital, but couldn't get his heart beating again.

What set Army Spc. Travis Babbitt's last moments in Iraq apart was that he confronted them in front of a journalist's camera.

An Associated Press photograph of the mortally wounded Babbitt remains a rarity — one of a handful of pictures of dead or dying American service members to be published in this country since the start of the Iraq war more than two years ago.


A review of six prominent U.S. newspapers and the nation's two most popular newsmagazines during a recent six-month period found almost no pictures from the war zone of Americans killed in action. During that time, 559 Americans and Western allies died. The same publications ran 44 photos from Iraq to represent the thousands of Westerners wounded during that same time.

Many photographers and editors believe they are delivering Americans an incomplete portrait of the violence that has killed 1,797 U.S. service members and their Western allies and wounded 12,516 Americans.

Journalists attribute the relatively bloodless portrayal of the war to a variety of causes — some in their control, others in the hands of the U.S. military, and the most important related to the far-flung nature of the conflict and the way American news outlets perceive their role.

"We in the news business are not doing a very good job of showing our readers what has really happened over there," said Pim Van Hemmen, assistant managing editor for photography at the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.

"Writing in a headline that 1,500 Americans have died doesn't give you nearly the impact of showing one serviceman who is dead," Van Hemmen said. "It's the power of visuals."

-more at link-




THEY KNOW HOW POWERFUL PICTURES ARE. THAT'S WHY ABU GHRAIB WAS SO BIG, THAT'S WHY TERRI SCHIAVO WAS SO BIG, AND THAT'S WHY THEY'RE CENSORING THE MEDIA ON THE US' FALLEN. I heard an interview with the LA Times journalist who wrote this, and he so much as admitted this. He also pointed out that there was only 1 picture of a US casualty in the American media during that six month period. Free press indeed!

How shameful to live in a nation where information is controlled in order to manipulate public sentiment like this. That this is Memorial day only makes the cover-up more obscene to me. The truth may not always be pretty, but we must face it sooner or later.

P.S.- Rate this story up

[oxbow]

1. Edited for tidying. nt

[DIKB]

2. So sad.

How their little ploy is actually working. Too many Americans are suffering from "Ostrich Syndrome," They don't see it, so it doesn't exist.

[oxbow]

4. Anti-Abortion activists

Once these anti-abortion activists came to my school. They set up giant billboards of bloody aborted fetuses, nazi death camps and lynch mobs. They had microphones and were yewlling about how abortion is like the holocaust, etc in the campus square. It really got a response from people.

I have half a mind to do the same thing, only with pictures of dead US troops and Iraqi children. It would be a great media reform stunt, no? "This is what the "free" press is scared to show you: the Truth!"

[MountainLaurel]

6. Someone here

A while back had created a flyer just like that to stick on the windshields of cars with * stickers and in the parking lots of the churches that told their parishoners to vote for *.

Can anyone around here provide a link?

[DrDebug]

3. The same applies to the Military Coffins

Since March 2003, a newly-enforced military regulation has forbidden taking or distributing images of caskets or body tubes containing the remains of soldiers who died overseas.







And many more @ http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/

[Wapsie B]

5. Yes it's very effective.

However those bodies of those dead soldiers do come home. There's not a huge uproar like there was with 'Nam. But there's got to be some anger on a local level. When someone from a small town comes back in a flag-draped coffin it affects people, and some may start to wonder what we're doing over there. Recently a guy in the store asked me if we had another 'Nam on our hands. I told him that we did. I don't know what his political persuasion was. But people are questioning things in their own way.

[oxbow]

7. In Iraq they routinely show the bodies from both sides on TV

I know cause I was in the Middle East recently and got the satelitte feeds. They are much more open about showing real life violence, though much less about sexual stuff.