A war of images

The grisly images of war have come at a fast and furious pace. Gruesome scenes of the bodies of US contractors desecrated by a mob in Fallujah were followed by photographs of the flag-draped coffins of dead American soldiers. Then came horrifying pictures of the nation's military subjecting Iraqi prisoners to degradation and humiliation at the Abu Ghraib prison along with reports that worse images might soon make their way into public view. While citizens were trying to make sense of those scenes, a gruesome video of the beheading of American Nick Berg made its way into the media universe.

In a world of instant global information, cable news channels that never sleep, and the untamed frontier of the Internet, Americans have suddenly been bombarded -- and perhaps overwhelmed -- by firsthand evidence of the level of frightening violence in Iraq.

"You take it in and you absorb it," said Ellin Bloch, director of the clinical PhD program at the California School of Professional Psychology and an expert in trauma psychology. "We're in the shock stage. You have to have some kind of mental framework to put this in. And so far we don't."

She added, "The difference between the Vietnam War and now is that everything is in real time where we can get repeated images throughout the day."

Several recent polls suggest that the widely disseminated photos of prisoner abuse have, at least initially, eroded support for President Bush and the war. The ultimate impact of these brutal images on public opinion is unclear. But due in part to what syndicated columnist Clarence Page calls "weapons of mass photography," the conflict in Iraq is no longer simply a political issue but a bloody reality for most Americans. As it turns out, it wasn't the combat to end the rule of Saddam Hussein but the post-regime instability that wound up being the battleground in the war of media images.

"You had a long period when the war was like the first Gulf War, like a video game war," said Matthew Baum, an assistant professor at UCLA and author of "Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age." "Sooner or later, the ugly images break through a little bit and the war gets real. Then you get the really shocking images, the contractors getting killed, the kidnappings and this latest stuff, and the costs start getting real."

In recent history, there have been a number of iconic news images widely credited with driving home the brutality of war and affecting the body politic. The nation's costly war in Vietnam was punctuated by the 1968 photo capturing the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner and the powerful picture of a terrified, naked 9-year-old girl running from a napalm attack. Media coverage of the body of a soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 may have helped sour the citizenry and the government on a US military role in Somalia. The journalism world and the nation at large were shocked by the release of a video depicting the brutal murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl -- killed in much the same way Berg was -- in Pakistan in 2002.

When asked about the potential of such scenes to permanently shift public opinion, Gallup Poll editor in chief Frank Newport said, "Scientifically, it's hard to answer." But, he added, "it's my impression that in an era when there is less trust of the media than there has been in the past, where print and audio can leave people unmoved, a photo has tremendous impact, because it's evidence. To see something does carry a significant impact."

The perceived ability of powerful news images to influence public opinion and then to generate pressure on the government for a change in policy has been dubbed "the CNN Effect." Its potency is a subject of heated debate.

"Does the media really drive us in and out of foreign conflicts?" Baum said. "I think the evidence on that is very small. [But] if you talk to foreign policy experts, they'll all say excessive public scrutiny puts pressure on them to make rash, knee-jerk judgments. There is a downside."

Morley Safer, co-editor of "60 Minutes" and a former Vietnam War correspondent, said the impact of such images depends largely on where public opinion already was. "If there is really general support for the war, the [disturbing] pictures are looked on with disgust, but it doesn't really affect people's view," he said. "If support for the war is shaky and dubious, it tends to push people over the edge."

Although one popular theory holds that news coverage was the catalyst for turning Americans against the Vietnam War, Safer believes there was a more gradual, organic change in sentiment. "The pictures may have had an effect of saying, `What the hell are we doing there?' " he said. "Really the shift came when the parents of the kids who were demonstrating were joining the kids, at least around the dinner table."

Two polls taken after the prisoner abuse story broke make a circumstantial case that the news and photos have had an initial effect. A Gallup survey -- in which 80 percent of the respondents said they were following the prison saga "very closely" or "somewhat closely" -- showed Bush's job approval rating dropping to 46 percent, the lowest point of his administration, while the percentage of respondents saying that Iraq was not worth going to war over rose from 47 percent to 54 percent in a week. A Pew Research Center poll revealed that the percentage of people saying the war in Iraq was not going well rose to 51 percent, the highest it's been since the war began.

"It's had a powerful impact," said Pew center director Andrew Kohut. "It moved the numbers more than the Shia revolt or the Fallujah atrocities. I think the problems we had in Iraq in March and April were disappointing. But this is shocking."

No doubt aware of these numbers, the Bush administration made several decisions in the past few days that have changed the images and the story line, including sending Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on a visit to the Abu Ghraib prison and releasing several hundred of the detainees there.

Complicating the public's reaction to the pictures from Iraq was the Berg footage -- which surfaced after the Pew and Gallup polls were conducted and whipsawed Americans between revulsion at the actions of the US military at Abu Ghraib and fury at the enemy for its brutal murder of an American. Several analysts say that the flood of horrific pictures -- whether featuring Americans, insurgents, or terrorists as the perpetrators of evil deeds -- will probably increase overall anxiety and concern about the situation in Iraq.

"The situation is so volatile and the images so graphic," said Kohut, "that the only thing one can safely say about American public opinion is . . . `More bad news out of Iraq.' "