People can handle the truth about war
That makes me wonder why the media have shied away from telling the story about Iraqi civilian casualties. News people and editors were more courageous during the Vietnam War. What are they afraid of now?
Who can forget the shocking picture of the little Vietnamese girl running down a road, aflame from a napalm attack?
And who can forget the picture of South Vietnamese Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan putting a gun to the temple of a young member of the Viet Cong and executing him on a Saigon street?
I don’t remember any American outcry against the media for showing the horror of war when those photographs were published. Were we braver then? Or maybe more conscience stricken?
Of course, the Pentagon did not enjoy such images coming out of Saigon in that era. Most Americans found them appalling, as further evidence of our misbegotten venture in Vietnam. Americans rallied to the streets in protest and eventually persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to give up his dreams of re-election in 1968.
Some Americans believe the media were to blame for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Nonsense.
Johnson knew the war was unwinnable, especially after the 1968 Tet offensive and the request by Army Gen. William Westmoreland for 200,000 more troops, in addition to the 500,000 already in Vietnam.
The Pentagon made a command decision after the Vietnam War to get better control of the dissemination of information in future wars. That led then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to create an office of disinformation at the start of the Iraqi war. It was later disbanded after howls from the media.
More recently, we have seen the Pentagon’s propaganda efforts take the form of carefully coaching retired generals about how to spin the Iraq war when they appear on television as alleged military experts. The New York Times’ revelations about those pet generals have cast a pall over their reputations.
Too often in this war, the news media seem to have tried to shield the public from the suffering this war has brought to Americans and Iraqis.
It’s not the job of the media to protect the nation from the reality of war. Rather, it is up to the media to tell the people the truth. They can handle it.
Pretty nice rant from Grandma Thomas. There has been a concerted effort, now well documented, for the Pentagon to control information that flows out of the warzone (embedding), and a concerted effort to spin that information when it gets here (GeneralGate).
In general (ha!), however, these are no more than delaying actions (perhaps that is their only purpose…) and the realities of war eventually filter in, as they did re: Abu Ghraib.
Robot Pirate Ninja 