How is it anything goes in advertising and entertainment, but when it comes to news there is hedging? Newsweek was criticized for its gory cover on Madrid. Cartoonists are forbidden to use a pencil with an erasure on top because of the penis factor. Television is encouraged to display dead bodies of the enemy but not those of civilian Iraqis or our soldiers. Obviously there is the concern for the surviving families of the dead, but identities in grisly scenes after a skirmish or explosion are not usually discernible. The truth — gleaned from Vietnam experience — is that the government decided it no longer will allow the Americans to grasp the horror of war. There are not even film clips of the war dead being sent home, lest the public begin to have second thoughts about this war. Why, even stories on the wounded convalescing in military hospitals are discouraged because the casualty list — if it can be found — is horrendous and could possibly break the national will or begin to heed Kerry:
“This country deserves leadership that faces the truth and tells the truth — that trusts the American people and knows that when we live up to our values, the United States of America never goes to war because it wants to, but only because it has to.”
Could it be that the administration to earn a second term on the strength of a strong commander in chief he must sustain the image on the aircraft carrier and lull the people that indeed “mission is accomplished” by bullying the press?
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: April 4, 2004.