Posted by Benjamin on: 05.08.2008 /
Once again I am confused. Today, 200 people were arrested in New York during a protest. The protesters were demonstrating against the April 25 acquittal of three New York City police officers who fired their guns a total of 50 times at 3 unarmed men in the early morning hours of Novemeber 25, 2006. One of the unarmed men was Sean Bell, who died from the gunshot wounds. Bell was to have been married to his girlfriend and the mother of his young daughter later that same day.
This hits a bit close to home for me, as November 25, 2006 was the day of my sixth wedding anniversary.
Here’s what confuses me: Why do 200 people get arrested protesting the unjust shooting death of an unarmed black man by New York police officers 18 months ago and the proceeding lack of accountability, but zero people get arrested for protesting the unjust shootings and bombings of unarmed Iraqi civilians by American military personnel each and every week for the last 5 years, and the ongoing lack of accountability?
Maybe Sean Bell is somehow intrinsically more important or more valuable than the 11 civilians, including a child with their parents, killed by U.S. airstrikes in Baghdad on Monday.
(and by the way–what exactly comprises a “U.S. airstrike”? One assumes it means that a military plane designed by a bunch of relatively normal people and built by a bunch more relatively normal people in a factory in Kansas or Seattle or California, armed with air to ground missiles designed and built by some other relatively normal people in a factory which was, perhaps, in Colorado, was flown by some fellow who grew up in a relatively normal family in, perhaps, New England, who … pushed a button which caused a relatively normal little kid and her relatively normal parents to die on Monday in Baghdad. Am I getting that about right? It all sounds almost innocuous, doesn’t it–almost … banal? Certainly highly ignorable by all the formerly mentioned relatively normal people.)
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Comment by: Helen
1 05/9/08 7:25 AM | Comment Link |People have protested the war, haven’t they?
Comment by: joe
2 05/9/08 8:14 AM | Comment Link |They didn’t get arrested, so it doesn’t count, Helen.
Comment by: Rachel
3 05/9/08 8:51 AM | Comment Link |I think part of it is that people respond more to an injustice that has an individual face. I was listening to the World Vision podcast a while back and they told about a study they had done asking people to give money for children in grave need. They found that if they made an appeal for assistance for a single, specific child (they included first name and photograph), people gave more money than if they appealed for help for multiple children. The monetary donations went down even when they increased the number of children from one to two!
When I hear huge numbers of Iraqi dead and wounded, I’m filled with grief and outrage. But all the numbers in the world could never impact me as much as this photo of an Iraqi father who has pulled the dead body of his toddler son from the rubble of a bombing. I think that is just how we are programmed as humans. A tragedy involving a single person who either lives close to us or whose face and name we see and hear will impact us more than statistics about nameless, faceless people far from home. I don’t think that is because people suck or they just don’t give a crap. I think it’s just how our brains work.
I suppose on some level it is a self-protective mechanism because we can’t continually absorb and feel and think about all the suffering and injustice in the world all the time. Or we would end up in the corner curled up in a fetal position. At least I know I would (I’ve come close a time or two.) I think we have a moral obligation to know that is really happening in our world and to speak out about it. But I don’t think we are bad because we simply can’t absorb and personalize all the sorrow.
Comment by: David H
4 05/9/08 10:34 AM | Comment Link |The Bush administration has worked hard to depersonalize the war. US Journalists are often dissuaded or prohibited from going to sites hit by US attacks and other journalists e.g. (Al Jazera) are discredited. US journalists are likewise prohibited from seeing any part of the process for moving US dead back to this country. I recently read of a family whose husband/father was being buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He was killed by an IED in Iraq. The family invited the press to attend saying that they felt people in the US were forgetting the war and they didn’t want their loved one forgotten. US government prohibited allowed media to set up 100 feet from the grave until the service was ready to begin. Then they forced them to leave.
I might also add that purposefully confusing the issue (who are bad/good guys; why are we there; what are our goals; when will we leave, etc.) makes it much harder for American public to decide how to respond. Vietnam was easy — we need to leave. Our government has heavily invested in making it unpatriotic to even attempt to discuss any solution other than doing what we are now doing.
Unfortunately, most US media (now in the midst of an economic downturn that will drastically change their business) are simply accepting the depersonalization and lack of clear policy. They are afraid to take a stance or even delve too deeply the way media did with Pentagon Papers and Watergate.
Comment by: Doreen
5 05/9/08 3:46 PM | Comment Link |David, I agree with you about the depersonalization. The images from Vietnam made quite an impression on me as a kid, and did a lot to fuel the anti-war sentiment. Not being able to see as much as a ceremony from Arlington, coupled with how desensitized an entire generation is to violence now, makes the war seem far away and not important to many people.
A man who robbed a bank in my town last month was chased by police from 2 jurisdictions, shot & killed. Shot while still in the vehicle by 7 officers (they won’t say how many bullets). Yes, he robbed a bank. Yes, he even had a gun. But did 7 officers need to shred him like that? People around here congratulated the county cops and our town’s new police force for their “first kill.” I was sickened by the comments in the Washington Post.
People here in DC get arrested all the time for protesting the war, BTW. It never makes the nightly news though.
Comment by: benjamin ady
6 05/9/08 7:47 PM | Comment Link |Rachel,
Okay, here’s a couple of specific U.S. caused tragedies in Iraq over the last 2 weeks.
Comment by: benjamin ady
7 05/9/08 7:48 PM | Comment Link |Doreen
What do you mean when you say “all the time?
Comment by: benjamin ady
8 05/9/08 7:51 PM | Comment Link |David
Why is that? Where’s the … courage? Where’s the outrage? What’s the point of the mainstream media, anyway.
I mean it seems to me like if just one mainstream media source would pick up and carry just the stories that Lily Hamourtziadou covers in her weekly reports, it would make their ratings go *up*. People like to be shocked and outraged, don’t they?
How is it that the hero America myth has seeped so deeply into the mainstream media?
I don’t get that.
Comment by: David H
9 05/9/08 9:53 PM | Comment Link |I don’t think it is quite that simple. For some publications that is what they do. Their audience does like to be shocked and outraged. But with newspapers it gets quite complicated. There is the myth of objectivity, which makes it difficult to do some shocking or outrageous stories. Then there is the whole big business angle to newspapering. When Pentagon Papers and Watergate were done US newspapers hadn’t sold their souls to stock-holders. Yes those private or family-owned publications were making obscene amounts of money (until a few years ago many US dailies had 15-30 percent PROFIT margins), but they were operating with some different obligations than today. When I went through J-school there was lots of talk about ethics and truth. Part of the allure was that a newspaper reporter could speak truth to power and power had to listen even if it didn’t want to. Now with stock-holders, dwindling profit margins, falling circulation and an increasingly polarized society, speaking truth becomes far more complicated. Will the truth sell papers? Will the truth drive away advertisers? Will the truth land us in court? Which truths are worth what it will cost to get them, print them and then defend them (possibly in court)?
IMO, many US newspapers became craven when they should have grown bigger cajones. Instead of getting brave in the face of an increasingly hostile or uncaring audience they got scared. Now, for many, many papers it is chicken without a head time. Bad things are happening, worse are on the horizon, we can cling to lies during the mindless scramble or set off completely into the unknown. The lies are just too warm and fuzzy.
Most papers just stand back and watch the few brave ones (like the NY Times), but even the vaunted Gray Lady can do little in this day. They are beset by confusion and have done some questionable things, which has played directly into the hands of those attempting to marginalize the entire news industry. They point to the errors, harp on the supposed liberal bent, play up all of the problems and voila — even if the NYT does an important story, it hasn’t near the impact of the Pentagon Papers. Remarkably lots has been written about the programatic and organized lying/deception (self or otherwise) that led up to the Iraq war. Until a few months ago more than half the US population didn’t believe those stories. And just a few weeks ago the Vice President of the US was repeating some of those lies in speeches while visiting Iraq. Even if people have the balls to tell the truth is anyone listening?
Lastly, though, in high level journalism discussions in the past few years people have debated who would publish something like the Pentagon Papers today or even those Pulitzer Prize-winning pictures that helped galvanize US public opinion regarding the Vietnam War (SVN police officer executing VC spy, naked girl running after being burned with napalm). The conclusion was that most US newspapers would not print them today. Audience reaction and likely response from US government were key reasons many would avoid.
As for the hero America myth, perhaps some comes from the rabid desire of newspapers to print good news. It is what our readers constantly tell us we don’t do near enough. But that may not be the whole story. Much of what appears in MM is just a reflection of prevalent desires in American society. It seems that despite all the evidence (Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and now Iraq) that a significant portion of the American public just wants to believe that their government is good, honest, and cares best what happens to the man on the street. We must trust our leaders because doing anything else would be unpatriotic. I don’t know that newspapers were particularly good at shaping American society in the past, but that appeared to be one of their missions for about 200 years. Today one of the most damning things that could be said about the American press is that it would, by and large, love to be shaped by American society if it could just figure out what it would like them to be.
Comment by: Doreen
10 05/14/08 10:52 AM | Comment Link |Benjamin,
There are people arrested almost every day in front of the White House, usually for stopping and kneeling in prayer. You can walk in front of the White House, but you cannot stop. And you certainly may not kneel!