Media Abuse - A Letter to Fox News Watch
Sat May 8th, 2004 17:15 MSTFox News Watch today had a segment discussing the prisoner abuse scandal. Never once did they consider the question of whether the photographs should have been released.
The following is my letter to the show:
I am shocked that nobody asked: “Should the pictures have been aired?”
Journalists have a first amendment right not to face prior restraint. With this comes a duty to behave as responsible citizens.
In the case of this story, the release of the pictures was irresponsible. Americans will die because of that action, and 60 Minutes II must have known that. The journalistic watchdog function could have been performed in this case without showing the photos, some of which will appear on terrorist recruiting posters and web sites for decades. Of course, it wouldn’t have provided nearly as juicy a scandal, but it might have saved many American lives. Waiting two weeks was not enough.
This was classified information. The person who released it to the media is a criminal. Were it not for the enormous political power of the media, a grand jury (or military equivalent) would have been convened to determine the identity of the leaker. If necessary, journalists would have been ordered to reveal their source. They would then take great pride in going to prison instead.
Why do you folks think you have not only a right, but a duty to release information very damaging to our effort to fight terrorism? Is it because it is a political year?
I admire Fox news, but I cannot admire anybody on your panel after the arrogance demonstrated by your failure to even realize that such a question is valid.
You people should be ashamed, if such an emotion is allowed in media personnel.
Consider me dismayed and disgusted
The media now assumes that possession of information confers an automatic and unfettered freedom, even an obligation, to release it, regardless of the resulting harm to the nation.
By far the greatest damage resulting from the prisoner abuse situations was the release of photographs. Had those not been released, the situation would have been appropriately handled by the steps already in process. Journalists could even have used their normal “gotcha” against the administration on this issue without releasing the photographs. But that wasn’t enough for them.
The consequence of the release of those pictures is potentially catastrophic. We are fighting a war for the “Hearts and Minds” of Muslims, especially in the Middle Easter. Information is a very important weapon and a very important defense in that war.
If we lose that war, we will have to fight a potentially much broader and vastly more destructive war, both to us and especially to countries that are involved with terrorism. Remember Dresden and Hiroshima, and extrapolate.
Am example of the damage done can be seen at the Iraqi blog Healing Iraq. It contains the writings of Zeyad, a young Iraqi dentist. Zeyad had been supportive of the occupation, even when one of his cousins was apparently killed in another rare incident of abuse (which is also under investigation). Zeyad understood that these events were rare. But now, Zeyad appears to have given up on us.
Thank you, 60 minutes II, for costing us an ally, and for humiliating and angering a good person.
Ironically, the release of those pictures may damage the military’s ability to prosecute those who abused the prisoners. Again, the media didn’t care.
As exemplified by 60 minutes and the Fox News Watch panel, the media simply doesn’t care. They are so arrogant and isolated in their own value system that the question apparently didn’t occur to them.
The pictures caused a scandal. The political scandal will follow the normal script for these. But the international damage may result in the death of many Americans.
Here is their Code of Conduct. You will find no mention of the national interest in it.
Note: Also published at The Command Post editorial section.
Cold Coffee, Hot Blogs
Here it is, Sunday morning again and time for my favorite event of the week…scanning my blogroll and seeing who is up to what! Mog has a post highlighting the good the bad and the ugly on blog design. I’m…
It amazes me how no one challenges the media’s ethical standards in the publishing of prison abuse trophy photos, thereby compromising the safety of our brave soldiers in the field, but the same media darings are aghast at the alleged outing of Joe Wilson’s CIA wife, someone who spilled her own beans under the hypnotic foreplay of Joe.
I agree that it is unethical to show these pictures, knowing the effect that they would have. They are pornographic and so sensational in nature that the rarity of the occurrence of abuse is forgotten. 60 Minutes’ blood lust is so intense that tonight they are rehashing the My Lai incident, hoping to keep the hate going. They bear responsibility equal to the soldiers for the damage to this country and to the efforts in Iraq that have occurred.
Mike and Patricia
Thank you for your comments and I agree.
Let me shed a little light on this. In 1971, John Kerry, who is favored by the mainstream “anybody but Bush” media, made many strong accusations of atrocities being normal practice for American soldiers. These accusations were not true then, and in fact those accusations and many other things he said were calculated to damage our will to fight. And it gets even worse than that.
By highlighting abuses by our soldiers, whether My Lai, Tiger Force or now Abu Ghraib, they seek to convince the public that Kerry was right to make those charges.
Kerry knows that his speech and it’s real meaning are eventually going to be a matter of debate. He is so wary of that period that his biography was carefully structured to hide the fact that he was still a Naval officer when he was saying these things, and then when he was forced to partially release his Naval records, he changed his biography to remove the coverup and not mention any service dates!
Here is what he said, to a Senate committee while under oath, and to television cameras which spread this all over the world. If you read it all, you will find the source of some of the myths that we Vietnam Veterans have had to live with, and some of the myths that to this day are believed by many people in the world.
Since Vietnam I’ve been against the media because of the attitude they’re displaying now. We have lost the support of Kurdo (a Kurdish blogger) to a certain extent, although hopefully we can gain it back. When I was in the Marine Corps, if I had seen a reporter in my area I would have told them to leave, regardless of the consequences. I despise them.
Just my two cents.
USNR 65-67
USMC 73-82
WAANG 82-86
John, the next assault from 60 min. II can be seen at FNC home page.
They have a young female who is shrugging off a couple of fatalities at
Camp Bucca(sic) and wanting to go home and become a civilian again.
My patience is wearing thin. We need to clean the Wahabbis up and then the journalists.
i doth think tho protest too much. first,you are giving the media too much credit in believing they know the difference between responsible and irresponsible journalism. people,they don’t care.what the hell does that have to do with RATINGS? 60 minutes is loving this. they want the attention,that means you are watching,you are buying thier advertisers products,you are fueling their bank accounts. sensationalism is thier name and ratings is the game. they only understand one thing,the american people in general are suseptable to sensationalism.if this were not true,i believe we would see alot more news concerning the good we are doing in iraq,uhgg,god forbid! want a solution,the only one the media understands? stop watching,see the ratings slip away. watch thier 1st amendment shield waver. demand concise,truthful,responsible coverage.will we get it? probably not. but we will have at least put our money where our mouth is. remember, there are alternative methods of getting the “NEWS”.
p.s. i wonder how much money cbs,abc,cnn,etc. pay those iraqies to pose for the camera, jump up and down and chant anti american slogans? oh,just a thought.
bo
Actually, in the few instances I watch CBS, if I’m polled about what I’m watching, I tell them Fox News. I live in a location where IF-detecting trucks (which can measure what channel you are watching from outside your house) cannot get in. I don’t know if they use those systems in the US, but they do in England (to enforce their BBC tax). So I am certainly not helping CBS. Furthermore, I use a PVR and skip ads, so they aren’t getting indirect revenue from me either.
We were once a “watching diary” family for a large polling outfit. You can bet that those programs never showed up in the diary, whether I watched them or not.
To hell with them.
By the way, it is too simplistic to think they are just about ratings. They are also political activists. They will show things that hurt Bush or our Iraq war effort (Afghanistan is still, I think, a little bit politically correct) just for the purpose of doing so. If you haven’t read Bernie Goldberg’s books on the subject, you might find them enlightening.
If you watch the coverage of the last two weeks, there was a lot of dramatic footage available of battle in Iraq. There was a sensational footage of Nick Berge, but all they could do was find things our military did wrong.
They could have done the same thing in any prison in the nation. Why don’t they mention the rape epidemic in our prisons? At least it would provide balance, and could be very dramatic (dig up an ex-con who was imprisoned for something trivial and who now has AIDS).
No, you have to understand that these people have a specific set of political views and an agenda.
I was once a co-host of a nationally syndicated radio show (more stations than Howard Stern). It wasn’t a political show, but i was able to interject my personal political views there. So the show was a little bit political - on one side (pro-gun rights), and I did it on purpose.
These people have much larger audiences and the power of video editing. They are using it against Bush.
Furthermore, notice that they showed a lot of very objectionable (homoerotic) pictures of the Iraqis, but they didn’t show the terrorists sawing off the head of Berg. So the prison pictures are in good taste but the murder was in bad taste? Give me a break.
The Berg murder showed the nature of our enemy. The press want’s people focusing on the “evil” of our forces and by implication, the “irresponsibility” or “incompetence” of the Bush administration.
So the prison scandal will go on in the standard form…. sensational information trickling out, grandstanding congressional “inquiries,” calls for Rumsfeld to step down, etc.
Watch the pace of events. The pace shows two things:
1) The herd mentality of journalists.
2) The pacing set to do maximum damage - in other words, to drag out the news of the bad as long as possible, obscuring news of the good.
Fox News has adopted a new practice, which will get them attacked in the journalism world: they intentionally show something good every day about what our people are doing in Iraq. And unlike the rest of the news who do the opposite, Fox isn’t sneakiy about it. They tell you they are doing it, and why.
It’s no wonder they beat CNN 3 to 1 in prime time.
John,
yes, I agree the news media are political activists. I also believe they have a political agenda. what that is and why is a mystery to me.ratings(aka,money) is what comes to mind first. i realize there is much more to it than that. refering to mike h comment to you on may 9th,if i may,I too was a marine in vietnam during the tet offensive of 1968,but unlike mike i did have an occasion to meet not one but two news teams during this time. what was ironic was that neither team had a single american journalist with them.(as I found out later,the americans were warned about getting in the way,and what would happen if the did,the Brits and Aussies didn’t care) the resentment we had then for the lopsided coverage they were giving and this resentment still prevails today in many vietnam veterans. contrary to the bias,the majority of vets then were and are still now good honest americans . Yes,we had our bad apples too,but we didn’t need the press to take care of it,we sorted those apples ourselves. they wrote about things they knew nothing about,and put us all in the same basket.they fueled the anti war sentiment and in the process prolonged the war and in my mind got alot of us killed in the process. think of this,on the day John Kerry threw his medals over the fence in washington,over 300 men recived thiers in vietnam,posthumously.
I agree with John. I believe someone was paid a good sum of money to give the media these pictures, without even thinking about the consequences viewing them would have. The media should think twice about what they allow viewers to see. Yes, they do have the freedom of speech, but how far should this go?
I also feel that most of the news stations that continue to show the pictures of the prisoners, are anti-bush. I may be wrong, but it looks awefully funny that this happened months ago, and it is just now coming out in the media…it is getting closer to election. Our government & military officials had been looking into the matter before this blew out of proportion within the media light.
I keep thinking about the situation with Nick Berge and the scandal abuse of the prisoners. Which is worse I say? If it were you or me, I would much rather be humilated than tortured and murdered. Being tortured and murdered is more inhumane than being stripped naked. What do you think?
Amber
Although we don’t know exactly how the pictures came out, according to the New York times, a relative of one of those being investigated contacted troublemaker and pentagon hater LtCol David Hackworth and through that was put in touch with Sixty Minutes II.
You can draw your own conlusions. I’ve drawn mine, but without evidence I don’t know for sure.
I think it is wrong to shoot at the messenger, the one who should take blame is the military and of course the secretary of defense, who should have resigned the day the pictures were made public. We learn that is even more abuse in the military! If you kept it secret it would be akin to Saddam Hussein’s misdeeds. Bush himself commented that only in a democracy those responsible get punished - but this only happened due to the media outcry (the military already knew about the pictures in advance!!!)