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This site is a member of WebRing. To browse visit here. Tuesday, May 18, 2004 Not on my television, please I seldom disagree with Jay Rosen, of PressThink—after all, one of the reasons I read his blog is that he knows a whole lot more about journalism than I do. But I can't agree with his conclusion, even after his long and thoughtful discussion of the topic (nearly all of which I do agree with), that it would be acceptable for the video of Nick Berg's beheading to be shown on network television. Rosen says:I think it's strange to go around telling the news media what to show and not show, based on your predictions of how other people--apparently less capable of independent judgment--will react to the news. It's strange, it's intellectually hazardous (your predictions can be wrong, and thus your conclusions too) and it risks inflantalizing your fellow citizens. You shouldn't do it, because if you keep doing it you will soon be talking about "the masses" and what they will swallow. Soon after that you will be talking about what the masses should be fed. I don't trust any argument--left, right, middle, fringe--when it assumes that others (the big audience, the mass public, the voters overall) will react with less nuance, intelligence, or critical thought than the writer and the writer's friends. To me it's a warning sign: anti-democratic attitude here in evidence.In another paragraph he wrote:Don't be calling for self-censorship by Big Media today when you may be hoping for less of it tomorrow-- because the images have changed, and the implications are now different. Be aware that if you want gatekeepers to let pass more of the news that helps your side, and less that helps "them," then you aren't really addressing the gatekeepers at all. In fact, you have surrendered the topic of news judgment to politics and its maneuvers. You've politicized it.I agree with every word, and still I don't believe the video should be shown on network television. The primary argument for doing so seems to be that CBS aired the Abu Ghraib prison photos. If we publicize in living color the crimes committed by one side, so the reasoning goes, we should we willing to show what the other guys did. I thought the fallacy of that tit-for-tat argument was one of the things we were supposed to learn in kindergarten. The people who said we shouldn't even condemn the prison abuses because, after all, "they hit us first," were roundly booed, as they should have been. The question is not whose turn it is to have their misdeeds aired in all its gory detail on the evening news, but whether the gory detail adds anything to the content of the news. Was it necessary for CBS to air the Abu Ghraib photos? I wish it had not been, but subsequent events have proven that it was—that nothing would have been done otherwise, that no one was listening, that no one cared. Without the national outcry, I suspect General Taguba's report would have gone to the same place as General Taguba, booted upstairs to live out its usefulness in an office somewhere, preferably out of public view. The reason for airing those photos (though I suspect the reason was not fully developed by CBS at the time of the program) was to make public, in a way no one could miss, what the military and the Bush administration were doing their best to conceal, that Reserve officers with little knowledge of the Geneva Conventions and zero to minimum training in prison management were being ordered to break the law. The same reason cannot be applied to airing the Nicholas Berg video. No one needs to tell us that it happened. No one needs to plead for the victim, to describe his terror, his screams or the agony of his death. No one needs to tell us the perpetrators were evil and vile—they stand accused by their own actions. Most of all, no one is trying to cover up what occurred. So the reason for airing the video can't be to make sure we know what the "other guys" did. We already know it in our bones, in our own flesh, in the revulsion and automatic wince we feel when we think about it. There is also the consideration of scale. For non-Muslim Westerners, photos of naked men in forced sexual positions may be repellent, but they are not horrifying. They offend the sensibilities of all but the most perverted, but they are not murder. They may be pornographic, but they are not snuff films. I'm ignoring cultural differences in saying that, of course. Westerners have a primal fear of death, of the loss of the individual. We take it for granted that all humans react as we do. But for many other societies, family or tribal units have greater significance than any individual member. For them, loss of position, of pride, of status within their community may be worse than the death we fear so much. (And if that seems unlikely, just recall what rape victims still have to face in America today.) There may have been a subtle (though probably subconscious) acknowledgement of this cultural divide in Nick Berg's murder: you do to us what shames and humiliates us the most, and we'll pay you back in coin of the same value to you—death. But this is America, and most of us don't react the same way to sexually humiliating images as we do to murder. For most of us, there are orders of magnitude of difference between watching someone being forced to masturbate, and watching someone being decapitated. The claim that because network television showed the first, it ought also to show the second implies first that escalation is an intrinsic right, not a logically provable assertion, and second that there is some inherent similarity of purpose and consequence in the two acts of publicity. My contention, as I've said, is that there is not. Another argument for airing the video is that it's already available on the internet. People have indicated that they want to see it. All the major search engines have experienced a flood of searches for "Nick Berg murder," "Nick Berg beheading," and similar kinds of search phrases and keywords. To me, that is additional weight against showing the video on television, It isn't necessary. Anyone who really wants to see the video can find it on the net. Don't have net access? Go to the nearest Kinko's, if you aren't a user of libraries. Finally, there is the consideration of motive. Whether it was originally intended, showing the Abu Ghraib photos on network television became a national act of contrition, an acknowledgement of wrong-doing. For many people, airing Nick Berg's execution has a far less noble purpose—to whip up feelings of revenge. To quote Jay Rosen again:Andrew Sullivan agreed with the letter writers in Dallas: "My gut tells me that the Nick Berg video has had much more psychic impact in this country than the Abu Ghraib horrors." He also said his traffic was way up, as it was on all political blogs, indicating sudden interest in the consequences of the Queda action: "People who have tuned the war out suddenly tuned the war in. They get it," said Sullivan on Thursday (May 13). "Will the mainstream media?" The "getting it" that Sullivan had in mind is an act of judgment about an act of terror: the Berg video, what's actually shown and said in it, and what it means for Americans are a far more urgent story than further images and details leaking out about prison abuse in Iraq. Normal sensitivity scales for violence and blood do not apply to a political murder and international crime such as this. We should look the Berg beheading full in the face; then we'll know what we're facing in the fight against terrorism. That's the argument.In other words, if we watch a man's murder, we'll understand why it was all right to bomb residential neighborhoods in the hopes of hitting a high-ranking governmental official. If we watch Nick Berg being killed, we'll know why it was all right to fire machine guns at a car approaching a checkpoint, a car full of women and children who couldn't read the sign telling them to stay away. If we watch Nick Berg's struggle and hear his screams, we'll realize that we're not dealing with fellow human beings, but with monsters who deserve whatever they get. Gosh, and I thought we were over there to liberate them. In the end, as a journalist, Jay Rosen has to be concerned with the larger picture, with where journalism is going as a profession and how it is being used. I have an easier job. I only have to worry about the ten-year-old whose parents thought he was safely tucked in bed, and who gets up to beg for a drink of water just in time to hear and see a man's head being taken off. posted by Liz @ 7:40 PM | The template is set to display 10 posts. To see all the posts for this month, click on the month name in the Archive section RSS Feed PERSONAL Send email toliz at life-as-a-spectator-sport.com Home I'm a mother, grandmother, a computer professional, Democrat, Christian. I welcome politely worded comments and email, my spam filter throws the rest away, so don't bother to flame me WHY 'LIFE AS A SPECTATOR SPORT' "If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings." I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I have to admit it's much less amusing than I thought it would be to see the artifical construct falling apart. 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I seldom disagree with Jay Rosen, of PressThink—after all, one of the reasons I read his blog is that he knows a whole lot more about journalism than I do. But I can't agree with his conclusion, even after his long and thoughtful discussion of the topic (nearly all of which I do agree with), that it would be acceptable for the video of Nick Berg's beheading to be shown on network television. Rosen says:I think it's strange to go around telling the news media what to show and not show, based on your predictions of how other people--apparently less capable of independent judgment--will react to the news. It's strange, it's intellectually hazardous (your predictions can be wrong, and thus your conclusions too) and it risks inflantalizing your fellow citizens. You shouldn't do it, because if you keep doing it you will soon be talking about "the masses" and what they will swallow. Soon after that you will be talking about what the masses should be fed. I don't trust any argument--left, right, middle, fringe--when it assumes that others (the big audience, the mass public, the voters overall) will react with less nuance, intelligence, or critical thought than the writer and the writer's friends. To me it's a warning sign: anti-democratic attitude here in evidence.In another paragraph he wrote:Don't be calling for self-censorship by Big Media today when you may be hoping for less of it tomorrow-- because the images have changed, and the implications are now different. Be aware that if you want gatekeepers to let pass more of the news that helps your side, and less that helps "them," then you aren't really addressing the gatekeepers at all. In fact, you have surrendered the topic of news judgment to politics and its maneuvers. You've politicized it.I agree with every word, and still I don't believe the video should be shown on network television. The primary argument for doing so seems to be that CBS aired the Abu Ghraib prison photos. If we publicize in living color the crimes committed by one side, so the reasoning goes, we should we willing to show what the other guys did. I thought the fallacy of that tit-for-tat argument was one of the things we were supposed to learn in kindergarten. The people who said we shouldn't even condemn the prison abuses because, after all, "they hit us first," were roundly booed, as they should have been. The question is not whose turn it is to have their misdeeds aired in all its gory detail on the evening news, but whether the gory detail adds anything to the content of the news. Was it necessary for CBS to air the Abu Ghraib photos? I wish it had not been, but subsequent events have proven that it was—that nothing would have been done otherwise, that no one was listening, that no one cared. Without the national outcry, I suspect General Taguba's report would have gone to the same place as General Taguba, booted upstairs to live out its usefulness in an office somewhere, preferably out of public view. The reason for airing those photos (though I suspect the reason was not fully developed by CBS at the time of the program) was to make public, in a way no one could miss, what the military and the Bush administration were doing their best to conceal, that Reserve officers with little knowledge of the Geneva Conventions and zero to minimum training in prison management were being ordered to break the law. The same reason cannot be applied to airing the Nicholas Berg video. No one needs to tell us that it happened. No one needs to plead for the victim, to describe his terror, his screams or the agony of his death. No one needs to tell us the perpetrators were evil and vile—they stand accused by their own actions. Most of all, no one is trying to cover up what occurred. So the reason for airing the video can't be to make sure we know what the "other guys" did. We already know it in our bones, in our own flesh, in the revulsion and automatic wince we feel when we think about it. There is also the consideration of scale. For non-Muslim Westerners, photos of naked men in forced sexual positions may be repellent, but they are not horrifying. They offend the sensibilities of all but the most perverted, but they are not murder. They may be pornographic, but they are not snuff films. I'm ignoring cultural differences in saying that, of course. Westerners have a primal fear of death, of the loss of the individual. We take it for granted that all humans react as we do. But for many other societies, family or tribal units have greater significance than any individual member. For them, loss of position, of pride, of status within their community may be worse than the death we fear so much. (And if that seems unlikely, just recall what rape victims still have to face in America today.) There may have been a subtle (though probably subconscious) acknowledgement of this cultural divide in Nick Berg's murder: you do to us what shames and humiliates us the most, and we'll pay you back in coin of the same value to you—death. But this is America, and most of us don't react the same way to sexually humiliating images as we do to murder. For most of us, there are orders of magnitude of difference between watching someone being forced to masturbate, and watching someone being decapitated. The claim that because network television showed the first, it ought also to show the second implies first that escalation is an intrinsic right, not a logically provable assertion, and second that there is some inherent similarity of purpose and consequence in the two acts of publicity. My contention, as I've said, is that there is not. Another argument for airing the video is that it's already available on the internet. People have indicated that they want to see it. All the major search engines have experienced a flood of searches for "Nick Berg murder," "Nick Berg beheading," and similar kinds of search phrases and keywords. To me, that is additional weight against showing the video on television, It isn't necessary. Anyone who really wants to see the video can find it on the net. Don't have net access? Go to the nearest Kinko's, if you aren't a user of libraries. Finally, there is the consideration of motive. Whether it was originally intended, showing the Abu Ghraib photos on network television became a national act of contrition, an acknowledgement of wrong-doing. For many people, airing Nick Berg's execution has a far less noble purpose—to whip up feelings of revenge. To quote Jay Rosen again:Andrew Sullivan agreed with the letter writers in Dallas: "My gut tells me that the Nick Berg video has had much more psychic impact in this country than the Abu Ghraib horrors." He also said his traffic was way up, as it was on all political blogs, indicating sudden interest in the consequences of the Queda action: "People who have tuned the war out suddenly tuned the war in. They get it," said Sullivan on Thursday (May 13). "Will the mainstream media?" The "getting it" that Sullivan had in mind is an act of judgment about an act of terror: the Berg video, what's actually shown and said in it, and what it means for Americans are a far more urgent story than further images and details leaking out about prison abuse in Iraq. Normal sensitivity scales for violence and blood do not apply to a political murder and international crime such as this. We should look the Berg beheading full in the face; then we'll know what we're facing in the fight against terrorism. That's the argument.In other words, if we watch a man's murder, we'll understand why it was all right to bomb residential neighborhoods in the hopes of hitting a high-ranking governmental official. If we watch Nick Berg being killed, we'll know why it was all right to fire machine guns at a car approaching a checkpoint, a car full of women and children who couldn't read the sign telling them to stay away. If we watch Nick Berg's struggle and hear his screams, we'll realize that we're not dealing with fellow human beings, but with monsters who deserve whatever they get. Gosh, and I thought we were over there to liberate them. In the end, as a journalist, Jay Rosen has to be concerned with the larger picture, with where journalism is going as a profession and how it is being used. I have an easier job. I only have to worry about the ten-year-old whose parents thought he was safely tucked in bed, and who gets up to beg for a drink of water just in time to hear and see a man's head being taken off.
I think it's strange to go around telling the news media what to show and not show, based on your predictions of how other people--apparently less capable of independent judgment--will react to the news. It's strange, it's intellectually hazardous (your predictions can be wrong, and thus your conclusions too) and it risks inflantalizing your fellow citizens. You shouldn't do it, because if you keep doing it you will soon be talking about "the masses" and what they will swallow. Soon after that you will be talking about what the masses should be fed. I don't trust any argument--left, right, middle, fringe--when it assumes that others (the big audience, the mass public, the voters overall) will react with less nuance, intelligence, or critical thought than the writer and the writer's friends. To me it's a warning sign: anti-democratic attitude here in evidence.
Don't be calling for self-censorship by Big Media today when you may be hoping for less of it tomorrow-- because the images have changed, and the implications are now different. Be aware that if you want gatekeepers to let pass more of the news that helps your side, and less that helps "them," then you aren't really addressing the gatekeepers at all. In fact, you have surrendered the topic of news judgment to politics and its maneuvers. You've politicized it.
Andrew Sullivan agreed with the letter writers in Dallas: "My gut tells me that the Nick Berg video has had much more psychic impact in this country than the Abu Ghraib horrors." He also said his traffic was way up, as it was on all political blogs, indicating sudden interest in the consequences of the Queda action: "People who have tuned the war out suddenly tuned the war in. They get it," said Sullivan on Thursday (May 13). "Will the mainstream media?" The "getting it" that Sullivan had in mind is an act of judgment about an act of terror: the Berg video, what's actually shown and said in it, and what it means for Americans are a far more urgent story than further images and details leaking out about prison abuse in Iraq. Normal sensitivity scales for violence and blood do not apply to a political murder and international crime such as this. We should look the Berg beheading full in the face; then we'll know what we're facing in the fight against terrorism. That's the argument.
The template is set to display 10 posts. To see all the posts for this month, click on the month name in the Archive section
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PERSONAL
WHY 'LIFE AS A SPECTATOR SPORT'
"If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings." I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I have to admit it's much less amusing than I thought it would be to see the artifical construct falling apart.
THE NON-ELECTRIC HOME
Cleaning, 1 Cleaning, 2 Cleaning, 3
KNITTING BLOGS
Extravayarnza Knitting Heretic Mind of Winter Pie Knits Persistent Illusion See Eunny Knit The Keyboard Biologist Taleweaver's Ramblings TECHnitting Wendy Knits
FINISHED PROJECTS
SELF-RELIANCE AND THE FUTURE
POLITICAL BLOGS and SITES
BOOKS I'M READING
How to Grow More Vegetables, etc. Small Scale Grain Raising
ARCHIVES
February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 August 2008 July 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002
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