Here’s an interesting articticle from the New York Times about how the American media is dealing with the challenge of showing the war. Traditionally, media have displayed images from one side of the conflict against images from the opposite side, striving for that journalistic impartiality that everyone worships except Hunter Thompson, and look what happened to him.
But is that really fair or objective, when one sides casualties outnumber the others’ by a factor of ten? What is objective coverage in that case? Ten photos of dead Lebanese for every one of a dead Israeli? And of course, Hezbollah has fired more on Israel than Israel has on Lebanon, although with less effect. So do you show ten times the tracers going south as going north?
What is objective journalism when the facts themselves can be interpreted as prejudicial?
Particularly vexing for many American news organizations is the struggle to determine how and in what proportion images of civilian dead and injured should be displayed in their coverage, when one side’s casualties greatly surpass the other.
The journalistic calculus is made tougher by the involvement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a topic that bedevils news editors like no other, and an organization, Hezbollah, that is considered a terrorist group by the United States government. But the decision-making becomes even more fraught because of the power of photographs and TV images, which are evocative — and provocative — in ways the written and spoken word are not.
