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  If it Bleeds, it Cannot Lead
The death of Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, The Associated Press and Defense Secy. Gates This is a difficult subject to objectively examine and is an issue as old as written communication and the visual arts themselves. The depictions of war, carnage and all the resultant horror form a thread in narrative and pictures from the time of Homer through Goya and Matthew Brady to the present. The unrestricted access to battle casualties by the press during the Vietnam War and the resultant depiction of the gory details of said conflict contributed to the popular mood of disgust with the war and went a long way toward molding popular support for the anti-war movement that finally helped put an end to that atrocity. I have come to the belief that it is absolutely essential to give the American public as graphic and bloody a description of the kinds of conflicts that are being waged in our names around the world as it is possible to give. It is imperative we see not only unedited depictions of the American casualties but also the horror our tacit consent has visited upon the "enemy" and above all on the innocent, especially the children. We must never forget that war is always against children. When it comes to war, there can no longer be any objectivity or dispassionate reportage. Journalists must help put an end to war by showing us its true face. I am afraid that this consideration must trump even the sensitivity and the privacy of the families of the soldiers themselves. Obama (and his generals) doesn’t give a crap for the health and safety of our soldiers or he would bring them home now. All this nonsense the brass always makes about not showing the flag draped coffins, what bad taste it is to show the pictures of the dead (mostly our dead) and how it violates the poor families, is just smoke and mirrors to cover the fact that they don’t want a replay of Vietnam where Americans turned against the war largely because they got a snoot full of the reality of the war every night on the 10:00 news. Never again! In order to justify such a ghoulish proposal as mine, I rely, not on my own experience and convictions but, on the words of a reporter who has covered, first hand, some of the world’s worst conflicts for the past forty years: WAR IS THE TOTAL FAILURE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT “I tell you, if you saw what I saw when I go to wars when I’m on the front line with or without soldiers or with civilians or wounded in hospitals, if you saw what I saw, you would never, ever dream of supporting a war again. Ever in your life. It’s a remarkable thing that the cinema, the commercial cinema, feature films can now show the bloodiest, goriest themes which are quite similar to what we see in real life, “Saving Private Ryan,” the guts spilling out. And yet real war cannot be shown without censoring pictures which in many cases are exactly the same as what you see when you go to the cinema. Or when you watch a war movie on television. It’s remarkable. And only when you’re there do you realize—If you go to war, you realize it is not primarily about victory or defeat, it is about death and the infliction of death and suffering on as large a scale as you can make it. It is about the total failure of the human spirit. We don’t show that because we don’t want to. And in this sense journalists, television reporting, television cameras are lethal. They collude with governments to allow to you have more wars because if they showed you the truth, you wouldn’t allow any more wars.” -- Robert Fisk Peace,
 Robert Boldt an editor of MWC News, is a freelance film/video producer living in Jefferson City, Missouri. He is active in local politics, worked on the Howard Dean and John Kerry campaigns and is a cofounder of The White Rose Collective. Articles by Bob Boldt at MWC News http://mwcnews.net/bob-boldt |
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