Al-Jazeera's graphic Gaza images inspire anger, hostility

The images broadcast on the Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera since the start of Israel's operation are graphic and at times, seemingly uncensored.

Earlier this week, Al-Jazeera repeatedly streamed the image of two dead children at a morgue, wrapped in white sheets with all but their faces exposed.

The pictures were repeated often and for significant periods of time, even as broadcasters gave the news of the hour or interviewed various guests.

The network's Arabic-language coverage of Israel's military operation, which has killed nearly 400 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, has been almost constant, with frequent updates of the number of "martyrs" killed.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1230733119509&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

And part of it is because they aren't afraid to show war dead. They've also shown Israeli casualties, but I don't see this anywhere in the Fox News of Isra- I mean Jpost article.

but something totally unrelated to the events in Gaza, Al Jazeera recently agreed not to criticize Saudi Arabia anymore (so much for free media). :eyes:

I wouldn't doubt they threaten to kick out or do worse to any media that doesn't toe their line.

and the ceasing of harsh criticism was part of the deal.

I would wonder if that has something to do with it.

When is the Emir up for re-election?

I had a good discussion about this one one time. Do we need to have it?

And which ones are autocratic but not totalitarian?

It is still Islamic but not to crazy extent that Saudi Arabia is.

Showing war dead does not make you one of the best. I would rather listen to Fox that that nonsense! Besides ascribing a news network as wne of the best you would need some unbiased agency that has studied it..not because it might aligns with your political leanings.

War is what it is, and people willing to levy war ought not to shrink from what their course necessarily involves, or complain when others fix their eyes upon it. People should not set about a business like this without being clear they consider the end they seek worth what they are willing to do to obtain it.

But constant exposure to dead bodies and disturbing images in general have emotional and behavioral consequences, especially with children. al-jazeera's excessive use of violent images is a form of mind control imo.

And you trying to pass it off as a form of mind control is plain ridiculous. If yr so bothered about the very real and fatal effects of what Israel's doing in Gaza, you should be out protesting it rather than complaining because people actually see that real people are being killed, and they're not just abstract numbers like some folk would like them to remain...

being exposed to horrific images regardless of the psychological damage it causes?

Responsible adults try to shield children from violence, not feed them a steady diet of it.

But if the goal is to engender fear and stress in children, showing round the clock DBs will do fine.

Yr claims that it's mind control is absolute rubbish. Of course we'll never see you complaining about any of the human suffering caused by Palestinian rocket attacks or suicide bombings being screened on the news, which to me is completely hypocritical of you...

and see that you acknowledge the point I am making about the risks involved with exposing children to violent images.

I have no problem with any network reporting the news, but that has little to do with the images the network chooses to air. As the article mentions, dead bodies are being shown for extended lengths of time, REGARDLESS of the actual story being covered. Is that journalism or something else? Why would al-jazeera show DBs on the screen when the anchors are talking about something else?

It's the responsibility of parents to ensure that their kids aren't exposed to graphic news images, not the networks. I'd hate to live in a world where what I get to see is dictated by what can be handled by a five year old. There's two points I'd like to make here. One is that no matter how well a parent tries (this is my experience at least), once the kids go off to school and have a life that doesn't revolve around their mother then there's no way to control what they see. There's graphic violence in computer games, on the internet and everywhere else they turn. Secondly, when it comes to what's happening in Gaza, my concern for the emotional wellbeing of little poppets who are unlike most little kids and sit and watch the news, and also have parents who don't shield them from graphic news images fades into insignficance when it comes to the very real harm that's being done to the emotional wellbeing of the children of Gaza and southern Israel. Networks here show graphic images, but the one that's stayed with me and made me angry wasn't graphic at all - it was where a Gazan family was shown and as they were filming an Israeli warplane flew over and the reaction of the little girl was one of sheer terror. That's the effect of something real that's happening to these kids and I bet that was the same reaction as kids in southern Israel have when they hear a rocket...

Adults must be shielded from anything that does not bring smiles to faces of little children....

Children can get deeply disturbed by violent images on the telly, but then it's up to parents to say enough's enough and turn off the telly. That's what I did the evening after Sept 11 when I decided the images of mass-murder was something that I wanted to protect my child from, and we stayed blissfully telly-free for about a week after that. But that's not to say images of the results of war shouldn't be shown. People didn't react to the Rwandan genocide until images of rivers blocked with bodies were televised, and there's many other examples of where things just don't become real to people until they see the results of war and violence on their screens...

and dissociative disorders.

The third hand broadcast exposure can be safely dismissed as any real concern....

I am a developmental psychologist myself, and certainly don't dismiss the problems caused by violent TV on young children.

But there is the damage caused to children by seeing war images on television - and then there is the damage caused to children by actually being in a war: even if they survive the latter unscathed physically, they will almost certainly be damaged psychologically. Perhaps realistic portrayal of war and its consequences might make it harder to make the decision lightly to go to war. And if you do still choose to go to war, at least you may be more aware of the likely effects on everyone involved, from soldiers to bystanders to the children.

Surely it's up to parents to avoid having distressing news programmes on when their young children are present? I can see the point of restricting the more violent images to late-evening news programmes; but surely censorship is not the way to go. War is too often romanticized, and graphic portrayal of the realities may counteract this.

FTR, I agree with the Magistrate.

I'm asking because I don't know. The US networks generally don't.

Should we allow executions to be shown on tv? how about animal fighting? How about showing the faces of young victims of crime?

The main point I am making is that al-jazeera is showing extensive graphic footage of Gazan victims as a way to trigger fear and stress in those watching, not because it adds anything to the story. As the article points out, dead bodies are shown on the screen even when the anchor is talking about other events.

OT but I thought you were a linguist, do you work in the area of language dev. perhaps?

The worst images tend to be reserved for programmes after the '9 p.m. watershed'.

I don't think they'd show the execution of an individual (we don't have the death penalty so it would have to come from overseas in any case). I haven't seen that.

But graphic war and disaster scenes might be shown.

They probably would not show the faces of young crime victims (though the tabloids might); but that is more a confidentiality issue than a violence issue.

'but I thought you were a linguist, do you work in the area of language dev. perhaps?'

Yes, I do; also mathematical development.

At least here in the US, generally graphic depictions of death are not shown on the news. If they are, there is usually a warning and the presentation is relatively brief.

During 9/11, for example, when large numbers of Americans were killed, there was not a lot of this sort of graphic coverage on the news.

What do you think accounts for the different approaches?

The US must be such a sheltered place to live. I've seen graphic images of death in many places around the world, and only last night there were images of dead bodies laid out outside a nightclub in Bangkok. And as for Sept 11, you don't think the repeated images of people falling or jumping to their deaths from the buildings wasn't graphic? Like hell it wasn't. It was terrible and distressing to watch, as was the graphic footage of the aftermath of the Bali Bombings that got screened constantly here. So instead of making out there's a difference between Al Jazeera and Western media outlets, maybe you should be asking why there's a difference between the US and other Western countries in what's shown...

That is exactly my point. They stopped showing those images of people falling or jumping to their deaths from buildings almost immediately over here.

I only know the US media so I should not have said "Western" - maybe the rest of the Western media is more like Al-Jazeera in this regard.

Is that your assertion?

It's one of the two reasons I turned off the tv and didn't turn it on again for a week or so afterwards...

I believe NBC showed one image one time and then they told the NY Times it was the wrong decision and did not air that image again after that.

The President of ABC News also came out with a statement at the time explaining why his network would not air any footage of people jumping from buildings.

I'll see if I can find that NY Times article.

What next? You'll be trying to tell me that graphic images of the aftermath of the Bali Bombings weren't shown repeatedly?

On edit: Graphic images of the casualties of war have been shown in the US in the past. It was those images that played a part in the rising opposition to the Vietnam war amongst the American public. Which is what I suspect the complaints in this thread about showing graphic images has been about. It's the fear of people seeing the reality of war rather than any fear of exposing kiddies to it or anything like that...

I apologize for the confusion.

I assert that the US media has a different approach to this kind of reporting than Al Jazeera and I'm asking about that.

Switch "Western" in my original question to "American"

The different approach in the US would be down to things like a desire to self-censor and to possibly portray violent conflicts in a more abstract way than some other media do. It's kind of a weird thing, coz I see so much graphic violence coming out of the US when it comes to movies and computer games, and there seems to be a thing that if the violence isn't real and is for entertainment, then it's okay to watch, but if it's real, then it should be avoided. I'm sure Americans didn't see too much of the reality of the invasion of Iraq, and that when they did it was a feel-good story (eg the little boy who was severely injured in a US bombing attack being flown to the US for treatment). Seeing the reality of the aftermath of war does have an impact on most people, and it's a shame in the US that doesn't happen anymore...

is meant to control the truth, once the 'facts' are reduced to a "he said, she said" dichotomy in the media (with Israel getting the upper hand in reportage), it becomes easier to confuse people, who are then only a motion away from apathy. Pictures of the reality would erase that apathy in a flash. Didn't the control of images from war zones originate from the Vietnam War (the US invasion of Vietnam) and the government's realisation that they had to control what people read and, in particular, what people saw in order to maintain a stable, domestic pro-war majority?

All these warmongering right wingers should be forced to see what hate does to a human body.

prefer the IDF's handiwork not be shown to suggest that it has inspired "much" of the Arab protest is ridiculous at best.
As for balance all one has to do is read both Al Jazeera and the New York Times and if you have any critical thinking skills at all somethings should be obvious

Is this type of coverage something that Al-Jazeera has done regularly or is it unique to this conflict?

so many times. Funny, no pictures of HIS victims in that piece.

blow up their offices.

Among the chief criticisms launched by Bush administration figures such as Rumsfeld against Al-Jazeera was that it showed graphic images of the dead and wounded from both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The Bush administration had learned the lesson of Vietnam, that images of actual warfare generally appall the American public, which seems less bothered by words describing the horrors than it does by pictures. Reporters were forbidden to photograph the caskets of dead American soldiers coming into Dover Air Force base. U.S. newspaper editors exercised a rigorous self-censorship, routinely declining the more graphic images of war on offer from the wire services, apparently on the belief that they would not be acceptable to an American public.

Al-Jazeera was the prime source of pictures of warfare, including dead and wounded, for the Afghanistan war. On Nov. 11, 2001, the New York Times quoted Auberi Edler, a foreign news editor at France 2, as complaining about the Pentagon policy of embargoing images from the war: "Our greatest pressure is that we have no images ... The only interesting images we get are from Al-Jazeera. It's bad for everybody."

http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2005/11/30/al_jazeera/index.html

into a war zone and report on the facts and events of the day.

I am sure Newscorp will bid for it!

It is no accident that the US has purposely targeted Al Jazeera in Afghanistan and in Iraq. US didn't want the world to know how many civilians were being slaughtered by American bombs.

I am certain that Israel and her rightwing allies feel the same way about Al Jazeera.

A source you posted from at least three times this week.

And yr going to engage in an exercise in futility if you try to find where I've posted from RW sources in the past few years, let alone the past week...

I don't think Israel hates Al Jazeera. In fact, I think they are grateful that they are given a platform by that network to reach people throughout the Arab world with their point of view. Most Israelis do find the network to be extremely biased against them but I still think they view it as a giant step up from the usual state-controlled media that exists throughout most of the region.