Does Freedom Endure?

|-‘Why is showing the injured or dead of the war important? Why has the media become the enemy?’-|

“Maybe I know what I’m doing here! These people are risking their lives for us. I want to see what they’re going through even if they don’t want us to, and I want other people to see it! What do you think they’re doing out there, protecting and defending secrecy? That’s the world of Mao… The world of Stalin, the world of secret police, secret trials, secret… secret deaths. […] You force the Press into the cold, and all you will get is lies and innuendo, and nothing, nothing is worse for a free society than a press that is in service to the military and the politicians. Nothing!”

There was a recent article in the New York Times - “Not To See The Fallen Is No Favor,” by David Carr – which was interesting, as was the backlash against it; notably the WSJ’s Opinion Journal, which asked the question “Why is it so important to show images of hurt and dead Americans?” The WSJ goes off into a conservative la-la land; however, the question is an important one. Why do we even bother with Journalists in the field? What exactly have 143 media workers lost their lives for? Why is the media defined for military supervisors as a “nontraditional” threat, on the same level as drug cartels? Why do soldiers with blogs face the very real possibility of being tried for acts of espionage?

Why is it that the media has to fight for its ability to fulfill its basic function? Why are reporters dying for information and images that are not allowed on TV? Why do our soldiers die without us seeing how or seeing the war they fight?

I can tell you why: 3756 Coalition Fatalities. Three Thousand, Seven Hundred, and Fifty Six men and women who have died in a war we started for reasons that have turned out to not even be the truth. Take a moment. Read that again. 3756 deaths. I don’t know about you, but I can feel that number, right down in my chest, and at the bottom of my stomach where it makes me feel a little sick. It makes me think about all those people with Support our Troops stickers and it makes me realize that they have no idea what’s going on with the troops they supposedly support, otherwise our soldiers would have come back a long time ago.

Why shouldn’t they have? Why do none of us have a good idea of the real situation in Iraq? Because nothing is worse for a war than to have the citizenry see it uncensored. Let us face the truth; the strongest element that worked against the Vietnam war was the television. Back then, when televised media was new, and raw, they broadcasted images of the war - deaths, lives, victories, and defeats - into America’s living rooms. The people saw something in their televisions, something horrible. They stood up and they said, as strong as they could, NO! When that many people spoke, the government had no choice to listen. We left Vietnam.

Today we have something different. Our generation has grown up with the television. For me and my peers we are too used to seeing what is broadcast as a work of fiction. When we see images of the war, they are separated from us, the pane of glass onto which they are projected works as a method of division as well. The impact is lessened. Then that impact is lessened even more because the images that show the war are censored, cut out, in the name of “privacy” and “operational security.”

You know it is a funny thing, but I can think of a few other leaders who censored the presses coverage of wars in order to prevent their full impact from reaching their nation’s citizens. They were all fascists.

Face Facts! These people fight and die for us. It is unjust that we cannot see who they are, or how they died. This war has taken a lot, and I do mean a lot, of lives. This sort of policy, this sort of secrecy, robs us of the impact that our decision as a nation has made on the families and friends of those dying for freedom. Part of that freedom that we value so dearly as to have spent 3756 lives on (thus far) is the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression, the freedom of the press. Yet, instead, they die, and their deaths are used, disgustingly, as an excuse for secrecy. By disrespecting what they died for, we are destroying the very purpose of the fight.

Ashley Gilbertson, a freelance photographer who has been in Iraq seven times to pursue his work, said “They are not letting us cover the reality of war … I think this has got little to do with the families or the soldiers and everything to do with politics.”

Don’t roll over it with bullshit about the “liberal media.” ANY media outlet that is not trying to bring these images to the forefront of the public’s attention is FAILING in its responsibility to the people. As far as I can see, the WSJ’s opinion article, and those who align themselves with its ideas, are outright supporting the abridgement of our basic human rights, of the soldiers’ basic human rights, and of our nation’s most important freedoms.

As our government tries to manage the press’s coverage of the war, it becomes harder to bring the truth, the hard, bloody truth, of the war to us. A difficulty only compacted by the rising danger to journalists, the cost of the war to the media, its journalists, and their resources, and the simple fact that as the number of resources dwindles the price becomes higher and higher for a result that lessens with each governmental censure.

“As the number of reporters there [Iraq] dwindles further and further because of the difficult conditions we work under, the kind of work they are able to publish becomes very important,” said James Glanz, a Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times. “This tiny remaining corps of reporters becomes a greater and greater problem for the military brass because we [the Press] are the only people preventing them from telling the story the way they [the Military] want it told.”

To bring the brutal truth of the war back to the home front is a responsibility of the press that dates far back. It is the reason we know what people sacrificed in the wars previous. It is the reason we know and feel the horrors and atrocities that have been committed around the world, throughout the past. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. With the government keeping our very recent history from us, is it any surprise that they are making noises about seeking to repeat it? Is it any surprise that it continues, without any real end in sight?

To quote David Carr, “If the government chooses to overmanage the wages of war in Iraq, there is a real danger that when this new generation of veterans, whose ranks grow every day, could come home to a place where their fellow Americans have little idea what they have gone through.”

New York Times – “Not to See the Fallen Is No Favor”
WSJ OpinionJournal – "We Are The Only People Preventing Them From Telling the Story”
Iraq Coalition Casualties
Operation Enduring Freedom Casualties (Afghanistan)