War Pictures by Antonio Lopez, UnderstandMedia.com Contributor
Regardless of your opinions about the reasons for going to war in Iraq, the Bush Administration has relied heavily on media management and imagery to justify and promote its cause. Whether it is Secretary of Sate Colin Powell using a multimedia presentation at the United Nations Security Council to cajole a resolution to support military action before the war, or the now infamous publicity stunt orchestrated by the White House in which President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier donning a flight suit, framed by a large banner, "Mission Accomplished."
Add to that the use of imbedded reporters and the vigorous attempt by the Pentagon to prevent photos of dead soldiers and flag draped coffins from appearing in the media furthers the resolve that images of the war would be tightly managed by the government. It's no wonder than that historians of the future might regard the unraveling of domestic support of the war as coming from images in the media.
As they say, live by the sword, die by the sword.
The premise of media and image management is simple: if you don't see it, it doesn't exist. Media activists have long complained that it's difficult to advocate alternative views when they do not get reported in the media. People who depend on media for information, especially television, truly believe that if something is important, it would appear in the news. After all, isn't it the New York Times that proudly boasts, "all the news that's fit to print" on its masthead?
Much of media literacy focuses on analyzing what is seen in the media, but more importantly, what is not seen is just as important. As writer Susan Sontag wrote in her book, On Photography, "Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images." Our culture is visual and it tends to believe what it sees, not only as proof that something happened, but also that only things that exist in images happen.
The first big blow to Bush's image management came with the release of a photo shot in Kuwait of flag-draped coffins as they were heading for the United States. Up to this point, unlike during the Vietnam War, we had not been privy to such pictures. Although the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was the first to publish the photos, they were quickly disseminated across the Internet and to other major media outlets. Meanwhile, a Freedom of Information Act request for images of dead soldiers was inadvertently granted by a low-level Pentagon bureaucrat, spilling more images into the pool.
The damage was done. And so too, it seems, the floodgates were opened. The hunger for such images, or to be more precise, reality checks, likely emboldened ABC's Nightline producers to do something that would appear on the surface a rather simple gesture: to read the names of US soldiers killed during Iraq conflict and to broadcast their pictures.
The reaction was swift and controversial. Ted Koppel, the program's anchor, was accused of orchestrating a political ploy to undermine the US war effort in Iraq. Sinclair Broadcast Group, a chain owned by Republican Party donor David D. Smith's family, instructed stations on the network to block airing the program. This kind of control and censorship is increasingly possible under the expanded ownership rules of the FCC, which consolidates media ownership under fewer companies. Because the large corporations are banking on government deregulation, they are afraid to air material that might contradict the Washington consensus. Hence, CBC refused to run the anti-Bush ad produced by moveon.org during the Super Bowl, and now we hear that Disney won't allow its subsidiary Miramax to distribute Michael Moore's latest missive, Fahrenheit 911.
But as any student of history knows, try to block people from seeing something, they will be drawn to it. The same day that Nightline broadcast the portraits of US dead, USAToday also published on its cover the pictures of servicemen and servicewomen killed in April, the bloodiest month for the US military in the conflict up to that point.
So far we have focused on the pictures of our dead. So many Iraqi military, insurgents and civilians have been killed thus far, it would take several episodes of Nightline or editions of USAToday to see their dead. The New York Times did an effective job of profiling all those killed in the Twin Towers. How do you think the public would react to seeing dead Afghan or Iraqi firefighters, police or children (otherwise known in Pentagonese as "collateral damage") as the result of US bombing? The tolerance for a sustained military conflict would become less acceptable, to put it mildly.
Which brings us to the most damaging in the war of photos. By now, the world has become familiar with the face of Army Reserve Pfc. Lynndie England who prominently appears in various photos taken at the former Saddam torture center, Abu Ghraib. Relaxed and joking, she is among other soldiers humiliating and degrading Iraqi prisoners in photos that have been universally reviled. Who could imagine that simple photos would force two of the world's most arrogant politicians, President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld, to apologize to the public?
Like the moment that Life Magazine chose to run pictures of a week's dead during the Vietnam conflict, it signifies a crack in the consensus, an emboldening of journalists to challenge the prevailing power. After all, it was the work of investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh (and a brave US soldier who blew the whistle on the prisoner abuse) writing for New Yorker Magazine that made the prison abuse images available to the world, and hence made the atrocities real.
You cold see during his testimony to the Senate that what brought the most ire of Rumsfeld was not that the images or the abuse existed (I predict that it will come out that the practice was routine and systemic), but that they were leaked at all. This being the most secretive administration in the history of the Presidency, from the perspective of warmongers, we now understand why some things are better left concealed.
For now, whether they like it or not, what is seen remains more definitive and real than any argument or spin conceived of by Bush's former political advisor, Karl Rove. For now, in the war of the images, this President's battle is lost. What awaits for the larger war remains to be seen.
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