Guarding the Guardians

Bruce Thornton, a classics professor and author in California, treats the problem of media bias in an essay running on Victor Hanson's web site. He complains, rightly, that the elite media, led by the New York Times, has given pride of place to the Abu Ghraib story at the expense of covering the wider picture in Iraq. Had they looked around a bit, Thornton argues, they would have noted that American troops have rebuilt schools and roads, attacked and killed Baathist thugs who would return the country to dictatorship, and worked to bring stability to that long-troubled land.

In Bruce's words: "[T]he media needs to keep the proper perspective and judge actions by the standard not of perfection but of flawed human nature and the complexity and unforeseen consequences of all action. One way to do this is to be careful with language. In describing the abuse in Abu Ghraib, the New York Times' favorite word is 'horrific.' If intimidation and humiliation are 'horrific,' what word do we use to describe Auschwitz, or what went on in Abu Ghraib under Hussein? The use of such rhetoric is a sure sign that partisan interpretation rather than objective reporting is driving the news."

And he cites the power of visual images to sway our opinion regardless of actual battlefield situations: "The most notorious example, for us Americans, of the power of misleading media coverage, particularly visual media, is the 1968 Tet offensive during the war in Vietnam. Images of Viet Cong in the heart of Saigon and dead Americans in the U.S. embassy grounds created an interpretation of North Vietnamese prowess and U.S. weakness, when in actual fact Tet was a failure for the North and a display of American military brilliance by any just standard. But the images created their own reality."

Similar observations were made in yesterday's WSJ ($) by Robert Kaplan, who was the only journalist to accompany Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment into Fallujah back on April 6. That same Marine Company had scored a historic victory at Hue City in February, 1968. Yet that achievement went underreported for reasons that bear great similarity with what we're seeing in Iraq.

As Kaplan says: "The Marines never got proper credit for Hue, for it was ultimately overshadowed by My Lai, in which an Army platoon killed 347 civilians a month later in 1968. This was despite the fact that the Marines' liberation of Hue led to the uncovering of thousands of mass graves there: the victims of an indiscriminate communist slaughter. Thus, Hue became a metaphor for the military's frustration with the media: a frustration revisited in Fallujah."

Bruce Thornton notes that the Allies had no qualms about destroying Germany and Japan before the rebuilding began. Kaplan eloquently describes how different things are today: "By the standards of most wars, some mosques in Fallujah deserved to be leveled. But only after repeated aggressions was any mosque targeted, and then sometimes for hits so small in scope that they often had little effect. The news photos of holes in mosque domes did not indicate the callousness of the American military; rather the reverse. . . . [T]he only time I saw angry or depressed Marines was when an Iraqi civilian was accidentally hit in the crossfire -- usually perpetrated by the enemy. I was not surprised. I had seen Army Special Forces react similarly to civilian casualties the year before in Afghanistan. The humanity of the troops is something to behold: contrary to the op-ed page of the New York Times (May 21), the word 'haji' in both Iraq and Afghanistan, at least among Marines and Special Forces, is more often used as an endearment than a slur. To wit, 'let's drink tea and hang out with the hajis' . . . 'haji food is so much better than what they feed us' . . . 'a haji designed real nice vests for our rifle plates,' and so on. Thus, it has been so appallingly depressing to read about Abu Ghraib prison day after day, after day."

Given the partisanship of today's elite media, counteracting the impact of visual images requires a sustained government effort not to propagandize, but to get the truth out. LBJ and Nixon failed miserably at that task during Vietnam; Bush has done better, but Kaplan charges incompetence among his staff in telling the American people the truth about Iraq. He calls for daily slide shows, films, photos -- visual images that tell the rest of the story. Absent this coordinated effort, the public will live only on a diet of photos and stories about our "horrific" behavior at Abu Ghraib. Kaplan's full story will appear in the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly.