Stupidity Begins at Home II
Australia’s Tony Parkison compares the media’s general refusal to run the Berg video with their enthusiasm for showing (real and fake) prisoner abuse pictures:
The mainstream media was right to withhold publication of images of a knife being put crudely to the throat of Nicholas Berg. But the ethical questions remain profoundly troubling. Do we accept that sometimes the truth is too obscene, too confronting? Do we accept there are good reasons to expose readers and viewers to inhuman savagery on this scale?
If the answer to both questions is yes (as it surely must be), we need also to acknowledge that by imposing selectivity for the best of reasons, we create the risk of a distorted view of how this conflict is playing out. If we are prepared to be shocked and scandalised by some images, but not others of a more graphic nature, is there a danger we are shielding our eyes from germane if deeply unpleasant facts, that might better inform our understanding of the realities and our choices for what lies ahead?
Read the whole thing. Please.
Once again we ignore facts and leap to “liberal media” conspiracies in order to sidestep issues.
The media showed elements of the Berg video, just as they showed ELEMENTS of the abuse photos. The Washington Post editor, for instance, says he has many more abuse photos.
If you would like the networks to have shown the entire, unedited Berg video, would you also like the networks to show all of the abuse photos available–and completely UNEDITED?
I don’t expect an answer here, any more than I should have expected one to the answers to the questions you posed the other day.
The big media people have just stood up and said… “You can’t handle the truth!”
Well, considering the rabid nature of the FCC ever since the Superbowl, I would think the networks would have an easier time getting away with showing the Berg snuff film all the way to the gruesome climax than they would even hinting at the nudity in the abuse photos.
I stopped expecting anything out of broadcast ‘journalism’ a long time ago…