The
debate about whether television should show graphic pictures of casualties
that flared up during the war in Iraq has its origins in the Vietnam War.
The debate involves perceptions of the ways in which visual images affect
public support for military conflicts, and the extent to which public
sensibilities should sway decisions about using graphic pictures of
combat.
The Vietnam conflict was known as "the first living-room war" because
it was the first to be covered extensively by television. During the
decade-long war, Americans saw thousands of reports about the war on the
evening news. These dispatches weren't censored. Journalists had access to
the battlefield as long as they followed military rules for protecting
operational security.
As the conflict dragged on during the 1960s and early '70s, public
support for the war declined. Many military officers believed (and some
continue to believe) that negative press reports, especially graphic
television images, were responsible.
Military and academic researchers say rising U.S. casualties, not press
coverage, led to increased opposition to the war. Their analysis of
polling data and the content of television news programs supports this
conclusion.
Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., author of "On Strategy," a book about the
Vietnam conflict, stated that "blaming the news media for the loss of the
Vietnam War was wrong." He wrote that the loss resulted from the
government's failure to convince the public that the war's objectives were
valid. This made the American people unwilling to accept an enormous
number of casualties, as they had been during World War II.
William M. Hammond of the U.S. Army Center of Military History says
television news organizations actually "went along" with the military's
request in 1966 to minimize images of casualties. The networks agreed
because they feared losing access to the battlefield or, "more likely,
because they feared that gruesome pictures broadcast into homes at the
dinner hour would prompt viewers to switch stations," Hammond wrote in his
two-volume history of news coverage of Vietnam.
One study showed that only 76 of more than 2,300 television reports
about Vietnam over a five-year period depicted heavy fighting or
casualties, Hammond wrote. Many battlefield scenes "paled in comparison
with the choreographed violence of such popular television dramas as
'Gunsmoke.' "
Despite this evidence, the conviction that television was largely
responsible for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam has persisted. This belief has
had a profound effect during the past 30 years on efforts to control
television images of conflict.
It contributed to the Pentagon's decision in the 1980s to adopt a
news-management strategy that controlled information by controlling access
to the battlefield. The approach was developed by the British military for
the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War. It resulted in coverage that was almost
devoid of casualties, and helped shape public-opinion polls that showed
overwhelming support for the war.
The Pentagon tried this strategy during the 1983 invasion of Grenada.
The Defense Department barred journalists from the island for the first 48
hours. Meanwhile, the Pentagon provided the press with casualty-free
visuals of the conflict, and Reagan administration officials offered
optimistic statements about the operation's progress. News organizations
used this material, even as they complained about the restricted access.
The initial news reports presented the image of a successful operation
with few casualties. This coverage buttressed public support for the
invasion.
The Defense Department used this news-management strategy again during
the 1989 invasion of Panama and the first gulf war in 1991 (see
"Collective Amnesia," October 2000). As with Grenada, the strategy
resulted in very few images of casualties and very high public-approval
ratings for the White House and the Pentagon. Much of the footage of the
gulf conflict involved U.S. planes taking off from ships and Pentagon
videos showing U.S. munitions hitting their targets with absolute
accuracy.
But media analysts and former military officers were concerned that
these images presented an inaccurate picture of war. They criticized the
Pentagon and the White House for presenting a sanitized view of military
conflict that could make Americans more willing to accept short-term wars
as an alternative to diplomacy.
The American people, however, supported the government's policy. A
postwar poll in 1991 by the then-Times Mirror Center for the People &
the Press showed that nearly 70 percent supported the press restrictions
and 90 percent expressed confidence that the military was providing
accurate information about the war.
Meanwhile, most U.S. news media did not show the public graphic
pictures of the gulf war even when they had the opportunity. Neither
television nor print organizations used shocking images of Iraqi
casualties taken on the "Highway to Hell" at the end of the war. For
example, the Associated Press declined to transmit Ken Jarecke's photo of
a charred Iraqi corpse because it was "a little too graphically,
gruesomely violent," an AP editor said at the time. Jarecke later
criticized this decision when he published a portfolio and commentary in
American Photo magazine. "I think people should see this," he wrote. "If
we're big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it."
British photo editor Colin Jacobson criticized such "insidious forms of
self-censorship" in "Underexposed," a book about photographic censorship
published last year. He said the "shifting cultural values and norms" that
affect what is acceptable or unacceptable in photography are "destructive
to genuine journalism."
But U.S. news media found when they strayed from those norms, people
were outraged. When television and print news organizations showed video
and still photographs in 1993 of cheering Somalis dragging the body of a
U.S. soldier through the streets, they received angry calls and letters
(see "When Pictures Drive Foreign Policy," December 1993). The irony is
that reporter Paul Watson, then with the Toronto Star, took the
photographs only because the Pentagon had stated that reports about
previous incidents of Somalis abusing the bodies of U.S. soldiers were
untrue.
Watson also was aware of U.S. sensitivities when he shot the
photographs. His first frames included the partly exposed genitalia of the
dead American, so he shot additional pictures showing only the head and
torso. "I didn't want to give any editor an excuse not to use the
picture," Watson said in an interview for a Freedom Forum Newseum
publication.
Since that time, questions about taste and public backlash against news
media that show graphic casualty images have played an important role in
discussions about coverage of U.S. military operations in the Balkans and
Afghanistan, as well as Iraq.
Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors
Association, says these questions pose "one of the great decision-making
issues" for news organizations covering such conflicts. "They do have to
decide how much is too much," she says. "It would be inaccurate to
sanitize the images that are being sent back. But there's also a question
of how far do you go?"
Harold Evans, former editor of the Times of London and a contributing
editor to U.S. News & World Report, raised a different question in an
essay last year. He asked whether a visual image "had a social or historic
significance and, if it did, whether the shocking detail was necessary for
a proper understanding of the event."
Evans would have used the picture of the Iraqi corpse taken during the
first gulf war. People "ought to have a clear idea of the sacrifices being
made, of what is being done in their name," he wrote.