‘You can’t handle the truth!”
When Jack Nicholson screamed that line in “A Few Good Men,” his voice sounded like it carried the firepower of a tank. In his view, that outburst was deserved. Anyone who has been through the ordeal of combat has certain bragging rights and experiences that no civilian can really question.
But while our men and women in uniform always will have experiences we civilians lack, should they always be the only ones to witness what happens during a war?
On Wednesday, CNN chief Walter Issacson was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” War is dirty business, and it’s much easier to show footage of planes being loaded with missiles and Pentagon briefings then it is to get a reporter on the front lines of a hostile foreign country.
It seems, however, that CNN isn’t turning a blind eye to Afghan suffering solely because of difficult reporting conditions or the need to protect kids from seeing burning buildings.
According to a report by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, CNN’s head of standards and practices, Rick Davis, suggested some phrases for anchors to use, such as, “We must keep in mind, after seeing reports like this from Taliban-controlled areas, that these U.S. military actions are in response to a terrorist attack that killed close to 5,000 innocent people in the U.S.”
During one CNN broadcast, a scene of bombing Afghanistan was quickly replaced by the infamous World Trade Center clip and an announcer saying that 5,000 people were killed in the attack for the simple crime of being at work on time. One thing inevitably leads to another, right?
According to Medill Prof. Richard Schwarzlose, this is another example of the overtly pro-U.S. bias of the media when reporting about Afghanistan.
“I think war is war, and a lot of people don’t understand that,” Schwarzlose said. “To bomb from so far away creates collateral damage,” he added. “Maybe that’s the only way. If that’s the case, however, the reporters should still tell America what the war is like.”
Media always should present both sides of every story, striving for objectivity. But I don’t think that the country is suffering from any collective amnesia about what caused the attacks. The first few days of television news coverage pretty much burned the image of the collapsing Twin Towers into everyone’s collective memory.
Does it help our perception of the war if the bombings of Afghan villages aren’t shown on television, or only shown with forced reminders and followed by video clips of terrorists?
In the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting report, Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism said, “It sounds as though they’re (CNN) worried about people being mad at them more than about providing the information that is useful.”
If we don’t get a clear picture of the fighting now, when it comes time to make serious decisions, our protected viewpoints might lead us to make the wrong choices.
Then we might have to deal with a truth that we can’t handle.
