The visuals of war
Journal
American media outlets are often criticized for their one-sided coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the claim often being that only the bad news is reported, never the good. While this claim is not unfounded (when do you ever hear of the American servicemen and women who buy soccer balls, candy, shoes, etc. for Iraqi children), the focus on the negative is perhaps just the nature of any reporter covering war -- which is, after all, never a positive moment in a country's history. However, while bad news is often the message being communicated by the likes of CNN, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and so on, there is a central element of war that the general public is rarely if ever exposed to: images of the dead. Death toll is something we as Americans are informed of via numbers, statistics.
This point is clearly expressed in a recent post on Adbusters' blog where the author cite's the mainstream media's failure to show the human cost of war. I found this post interesting because at the moment I'm working on an article about post-traumatic stess disorder (PTSD) in U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In my conversations with veterans suffering from PTSD, one of the root causes of their trauma often stems from something they saw. For example, many veterans have witnessed, at close range, the death of a friend or fellow soldier, and can't erase that final graphic image from their memory.
When reading this post I automatically thought: If soldiers, who are trained to work in the chaos of war are haunted by images of the dead, how would the general public react to seeing the broken bodies of its soldiers in the morning newspaper or on the evening news? Would these images act as a reminder that our country is indeed at war in a foreign nation and our troops are being injured or killed at a rapid rate? Or would these images only further spread the trauma of war causing a sort of meta-PTSD in the readers and viewers exposed to them?
This question of whether to show or censor the photos of dead U.S. military personnel remains unanswered and hotly debated. A microcosm of the wider debate recently unfolded on the blog of photojournalist Zoriah Miller. He came under fire from the military (and blog readers) after publishing graphic photos of the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Anbar province in Iraq. He did not censor what his camera captured and that meant showing the bodies of dead U.S. soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and disturbing images such as a bloodied, disembodied hand left in the street.
Zoriah's account of this particular Al-Qaeda suicide bombing contains the type of insight lacking from much of the mainstream media news coverage. As an embedded photojournalist, Zoriah mobilizes when his unit does. This allows him to capture a realistic, unsanitized narrative. And it is devoid of romanticism for war:
"The soldier who is running next to me glances onto the pavement at the same time as I do. There is an ear on the ground. About five feet away, we see a chunk of scalp with hair on a palm sized piece of skull. We look at each other, realizing that we are walking into true madness …and this is just the beginning."
Zoriah is an independent photojournalist, which means he is a freelancer, and relies on being embedded with the U.S. military to do his job (being a journalist in Iraq is quickly becoming too expensive and too dangerous to do without military support of some sort). After these images were shown on his website, and later picked up by major media outlets like The New York Times, Zoriah's status as an embedded journalist was under scrutiny by the U.S. military. As the access journalists are allowed to have on the war front becomes harder to secure, this debate about whether or not to show images of the dead may soon become irrelevant.
All images copyright 2008 Zoriah Miller.
