Prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison and war coverage in general
The military investigaton of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison (and elsewhere) has been public knowledge since January, although largely ignored by the press until the recent expose on 60 Minutes II. Other media outlets have rushed to get both real and fake pictures into print. It has become this summer’s big distraction during the political silly season leading up to the November elections.

Prisoner abuse is nothing new and has probably taken place in all but the most minor armed conflicts. Armies are not social service or law enforcement agencies, and don't do perform either function very well. As George Orwell observed in 1942, “men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”

That’s not to say that the abuse story isn’t important or that the news media should ignore it. What is inexcusable is that it is being blown out of all proportion in an irresponsible manner that will inevitably cause loss of life and serious harm to the war effort. Graphic pictures of abuse may not have been the motive behind the beheading of Daniel Berg, but they did provide his murderers with an excuse.

Moreover, the excessive use of the pictures compares oddly with the decision not to show images of people leaping to their deaths from the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. As Salt Lake Tribune ombudsman Connie Coyne observes:

More photographs and still pictures from digital video of prisoner abuse in Iraq were released this week by The Washington Post. They apparently show different troops involved in variations on the treatment that has been shown already.

And, after looking at them, I do not believe they advance the story of prisoner abuse beyond what other stories have depicted. I see little reason for printing more of them in newspapers or showing the digital video on TV.

Which leads to another issue; the obsessive reporting of American wrongdoing, both real and imagined, while ignoring or down playing that of our enemies. Consider the argument of Atlanta Journal-Constitution ombudsman Mike King addressing complaints that his newspaper downplayed the Nicholas Berg story:

I'm frankly at a loss to explain what level of partisanship or ideology can create a calculus where coverage of an act of barbarism leads to any good political outcome.

The answer to that is quite simple. People need to know why we are at war and what it is we face, not just about the misbehavior of a handful of our own soldiers.

To argue that there can be no “good political outcome” from coverage of the brutal murder of an American civilian is to argue that people should not be informed of the nature or purpose of the war on terror. It is the same mindset that refuses to acknowledge Palestinian Authority-sponsored terrorism while editorializing against anti-terrorist Israeli policies.

Bad things happen when the press ignores acts of barbarism. The then-"newspaper of record," the New York Times, ignored Stalin’s famines and the Holocaust until both were history. The press ignored genocide in Rwanda and Burundi until it was too late, and to this day ignores both slavery and government-sanctioned mass-murder in the Sudan. Torture remains commonplace in much of the Arab world, yet the same networks covering the abuses at Abu Ghraib ignore it. Senator Edward Kennedy equated the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison with torture as it existed under Saddam Hussein, and the absurdity of the comparison was largely ignored by the press.

The press is also failing to report positive news from Iraq. The result is that accounts by servicemen in Iraq seem at odds with the overall image of unmitigated disaster carried by mainstream media. Over a year ago, ABC Watch observed of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage of Iraq:

DEPENDING AS I DO on Auntie's broadcasts for all of my news of the liberation of Iraq, I have found it necessary to resort to the principle employed by war observers in ancient times.

I note the direction of the US defeats as they noted the direction of the king's victories.

Auntie's presenters and commentators, to a man or woman, are utterly convinced the skirmishes in southern Iraq amount to a major set-back. The label "Vietnam" has already been tied to the toe of this campaign.

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin claims, "recent events remind me of another May with a similar resonance -- May 1968,” France's month of revolution. A better analogy is to an earlier event in 1968, the Tet offensive. The offensive was a significant military defeat for the communists, but a decisive public relations victory. As the Los Angeles Times' Robert Elegant observed, "For the first time in modern history the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen."
posted at 10:36 AM