In the war of words that coincides with every foreign conflict, it is the visual impact of images that is remembered most. Our collective memory is organized by the recognizable, and often stereotypical, depictions of destruction and death.
Chris Hedges national bestselling book, War is a force that gives us meaning , that war creates its own culture. “It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death.”
Hedges understands the attraction of war as an inevitability -- something that adds purpose, reason, and meaning to life. “War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.”
What we see in the scenes of suffering and carnage in the Middle East may be considered an obscenity on one hand. However, the images are also part of a mythmaking process – stream of visual messages sold to us by politicians, generals, historians, filmmakers, writers, and even journalists (Hedges, p. 3). The mythmakers, according to Hedges, bestow war with qualities such as “excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.”
Pictures of war are all of these things and there is a sickness in them that we have seen many times before. In the continuing crisis in Lebanon, for example, apparently the United States media appears to be presenting a very different picture than its counterparts around the globe. Recently, a few commentators have taken note of the disparities in how the conflict is between covered by the U.S. media than it is by the rest of the world.
Washington Post writer Jefferson Morley has been keeping track of what the rest of the world has been saying about how the Western media’s coverage of the crisis dramatically differs from the rest of the world.
In his analysis, Morley quotes from an article in the Lebanon Daily Star by Marc Sirois criticizing the highly sanitized versions of the news in the Western press. According to Sirois: “The vast majority of Western media reports do not accurately portray the fact that the vast majority of the dead are civilians, most of them women and children….For the most part Western television viewers, newspaper readers, and Web surfers are reading highly sanitized versions of the news, spun in such a way as to dilute the brutality of the Israeli onslaught and especially to ensure that blame is placed squarely on Lebanon in general and Hizbullah in particular.”
What Morley and others seem to want us to think about is how the U.S. media spins a more sanitized version of the news without the audience ever questioning the coverage.
In his essay, Morley compares recent news reports from U.S. media with those of European news outlets. Apparently, the reportage is pretty skewed and reflects the foreign policy interests of the U.S. in the region. Morley discovered that while the U.S. media focused predominantly on the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Lebanon this past Wednesday, European news agencies were reporting the increasing number of civilians being killed in the conflict.
Pictures from this past week playing up the evacuation of U.S. families from Lebanon in the news media support this claim. At the same time, the killing of Lebanese civilians, especially children by Israeli air strikes was downplayed. Morley concludes, “The disparate reaction to Lebanon's civilian casualties may simply reflect the larger beliefs of the societies in which journalists work.”
At this point, we should reconsider what exactly is the work of journalists. Is it a journalist’s job to inculcate readers with particular tastes, values, and ideologies? As a journalist, turned educator, it is impossible to not to think about how news decisions are made.
Increasingly it is clear to me that the events that shape what is determined to be news are interpreted through a complex array of filters -- personal, social, professional, institutional, cultural, and even political. The importance to journalism, and ultimately public confidence in the press, is that we should be able to recognize and acknowledge our biases and make transparent the processes in which news is gathered and presented.