Coverage of war dead triggers fierce debate
Several times during the conflict in Iraq, US news outlets have had to make tough choices. Last year, journalists debated the propriety of displaying the mutilated bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons Qusay and Uday after they had been killed by US forces. A month ago, the tough call was whether to show the charred remains of American civilian contractors murdered in Fallujah.
But in recent days -- after controversies erupted over images of flag-draped coffins of US troops and the decision to read the names of more than 700 Americans killed in Iraq on "Nightline" -- a new kind of ethical dilemma has emerged: Is the media's focus on the casualties incurred in a controversial war during an election year an act of journalism or politics?
"It is really infuriating that anybody should try to play down the deaths of those soldiers," said Sig Christenson, vice president of Military Reporters & Editors, an organization founded in 2002 to increase the media's access to war zones. "I realize the political implications of the images, [but Americans] need to know what price is being paid."
"Journalism is in the eye of the reader," said retired Air Force lieutenant general Tad Oelstrum, director of the national security program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "You can't separate journalism and politics."
In late April, the Pentagon's ban on pictures of coffins returning home was shattered when the website www.thememoryhole.org obtained photographs through a Freedom of Information request and numerous media outlets published or aired the pictures. A few days earlier, The Seattle Times published a photo of coffins taken by an employee of a military contractor; she was then fired.
Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner wrote in an e-mail to the Globe that the ban on coverage, which has been in effect since 1991 but was "reissued" in March 2003, is designed "to protect the wishes and the privacy of the families during their time of greatest loss and grief."
But Robert Pfaltzgraff, a professor of international security studies at Tufts Fletcher School, voices a widely held view that the White House is worried such images may erode support for the Iraq effort. "The decision not to display casualties in terms of coffins coming home is a concern that this might make a political statement," he said.
In a column to readers, Seattle Times executive editor Mike Fancher acknowledged that "some will see this picture as an antiwar statement," but said that wasn't the paper's motivation. Times managing editor Dave Boardman said about 80 percent of the roughly 2,000 calls, e-mails, and letters the paper received in reaction to the photo voiced approval, including positive responses from dozens of military families.
If the coffin photos ignited the debate over the media's treatment of war dead, the decision to read the names and show photos of Iraq fatalities in Friday's edition of "Nightline" -- titled "The Fallen" -- triggered a full-fledged explosion. The
Asked for reaction, White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said: "We're not media critics. Decisions about television programs are made by program executives."
During Friday night's program, Koppel said some viewers "are convinced that I'm opposed to the war. I'm not." But, he said, "I'm opposed to sustaining the illusion that war can be waged by the sacrifice of a few without burdening the rest of us in any way." ABC News had its allies, too, including Arizona Republican senator John McCain, who wrote to Sinclair president David Smith to protest the decision to preempt "Nightline," and Common Cause president Chellie Pingree, who declared, "Sinclair's censorship is only a taste of the choke hold on information that media giants are able to achieve."
Pfaltzgraff said the media's treatment of Iraq casualties is inextricably intertwined with politics. "The greater the support, the greater the willingness to accept casualties and the greater the willingness to discuss casualties," he said.
But Scott Bosley, executive director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said that focusing on the casualty count is also a journalistic obligation. "It's a very important part of the coverage," he said. "And I don't think it's political. It's reality."
