US Media Sanitizes Human Cost of War. Possible Solution?

First, an excerpts from the recent LAT article, Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories:

"A review of six prominent U.S. newspapers and the nation's two most popular newsmagazines during a recent six-month period found almost no pictures from the war zone of Americans killed in action. During that time, 559 Americans and Western allies died. The same publications ran 44 photos from Iraq to represent the thousands of Westerners wounded during that same time."

American television news also has delivered a relatively blood-free portrait, according to academics who have studied video imagery from the war. A George Washington University survey of about 2,000 TV news segments found that the war had been "sanitized" and rendered "free of bloodshed."

"Americans have a view of war that comes out of World War II, that war is a sort of sacred national cause," said Daniel C. Hallin, a communications professor at UC San Diego, who has conducted extensive reviews of TV war coverage. "We are all supposed to unite around war … because these great sacrifices are being made for freedom."

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20050521/ts_latimes/unseenpicturesuntoldstories



I really feel that the reason the anti-war movement hasn't seen more popular support in the US is because of this sanitized version of war that most people are getting. The reason Abu Ghraib, Terri Schiavo and other recent media shitstorms have been so big is because of the power that images have on people. A picture is priceless because it gets past excuses and busllshit and into the heart of the matter, that these are human beings whose future has forever ended or been changed because of Bush's war.

What is the solution? Well, I remember a few years back, an anti-abortion group came to our school. They had printed out giant billboards showing pictures of aborted fetuses, holocaust victims and other powerful imagery. They were camped out on campus square talking, often yelling, with people about how abortion is wrong, and has no place in civilized society. It got a real reaction out of almost everybody. I stayed there talking and listening for about an hour, and that exchange significantly changed how I have viewed the issue since.

I propose the same thing, except using images of the American dead and the innocent Iraqi children killed or maimed by the war. We can make large scale prints relatively cheaply at Kinko's. I also know an art-print place that will print and mount large scale images for half-price for me. We can take along literature such as the Downing street memo, the recent UK report revealing that we doubled our bombing immediately before the war started, excerpts from Paul O'Neill's book, and other documents which make the case for this being an illegal war. The key is to bring home the human cost of this war, and the photographs can do this like nothing else. What do y'all think?


edit for tidying