E-Mail This Article to a Friend Heart of darkness (continued)

THOUGH IT IS the lens of the media through which we see the Fallujah images, the media themselves have been ambivalent about whether to show those pictures, and under what circumstances. This is understandable. The mainstream media are uncomfortable with graphic portrayals of death, and newsworthiness must always be balanced against cultural sensibilities.

Photographs of the Mogadishu scenes won a Pulitzer Prize for Paul Watson, of the Toronto Star; yet he and his newspaper were subjected to withering criticism for publishing those pictures in the first place. More recently the Boston Phoenix, in 2002, made a controversial decision to publish a link on its Web site to the propaganda video that terrorists had made of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The video concludes with Pearl’s decapitation. The Phoenix also published two small images from the video to accompany an editorial in its print edition, one of which was of Pearl’s severed head being held aloft (see "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, June 14, 2002). The Phoenix was criticized by many, including Pearl’s family. Others, though, such as Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, defended it as necessary to provide a fuller understanding of the extent of anti-American, anti-Semitic terrorism. "The product being sold is hate and the murder of innocents by people who think no Jew, no American, could be innocent," Cohen wrote. (Pearl was Jewish, and his killers made much of that in their sadistic snuff film.)

As news of the Fallujah killings began to spread on March 31, the worst of the images were instantly made available on the Internet. Yahoo News offered a slideshow of photos, showing a corpse being beaten, a body part dangling from an overhead wire, and, of course, bodies hanging from the bridge as the locals celebrated. The New York Times’ Web site posted an Associated Press video showing some of the same scenes, plus a body being dragged through the streets. That evening, though, the network newscasts were quite a bit more squeamish, although they ran more-graphic footage as the evening wore on. The next day’s papers were a mixed bag. The New York Times led with a notably graphic scene of the bridge and the crowd. But according to the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, the Times was in the minority: 13 of the 20 largest dailies in the country opted not to run a photo depicting a dead body on their front pages.

Locally, the Boston Globe ran on page one an Agence France-Presse color photo of cheering Iraqis in front of a burning vehicle, with one of the celebrants holding a sign in Arabic that was translated as saying FALLUJAH, CEMETERY OF THE AMERICANS. Inside was a smaller black-and-white Reuters photo of men and boys beating a corpse with their shoes, although the photo was so dark that the body could not be discerned. The tabloid Boston Herald, by contrast, ran an Associated Press color photo of the bridge, a body, and the crowd beneath the banner headline SAVAGES, a virtual carbon copy of that day’s New York Post. The Herald claimed it had darkened the image of the body, although it did not look notably different from photos published in the Times and elsewhere.

In response to an e-mail query, Globe editor Martin Baron told me that he decided not to run a more graphic photo on the front page because readers — and their children — have no choice about whether to look at it or not when it arrives at their homes. "In this instance," he said, "we had a reasonable option available to us: run a powerful image on page one, but publish a more graphic one inside. The news of mutilation received prominence on the front page as our lead story and headline, but readers were not immediately confronted with an image they might not expect and could not stomach."

Herald editorial director Ken Chandler did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Deciding what to do with such images is a difficult issue, and one for which there are no right and wrong answers. Writing for the New Republic’s Web site, Adam Kushner actually blasted the media for not running an even more graphic photo, of a clearly visible charred corpse, its arms and legs reduced to stumps, being beaten by stick-wielding Iraqis as it lay on the ground. It was, indeed, stomach-churning. Yet within a day, it had been removed in order to make room for new content, even though the essay itself remained online. TNR Online editor Richard Just told me by e-mail that it was simply a matter of the site being updated, and not a sign that anyone had gotten squeamish. In an ironic mirror image, the online magazine Slate on Tuesday published an essay by the novelist Jim Lewis, who argued against running what he called "horror-porn"; yet his piece was accompanied by three of the Fallujah photos he was denouncing, one of them the same picture for which Kushner had advocated on TNR Online.

Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television, at Syracuse University, believes that the real challenge for the media is not in deciding whether to run such graphic images, but to do so in a way that explains them and places them within a larger narrative of what is really taking place. "What is called for, whenever these kind of pictures are available, is an even stronger mandate to responsibly try to place them into context," says Thompson. "Journalists need to make even more of an effort to counteract the tyranny of the visual. Not to erase it — pictures are one of the tools journalists have to tell us what is going on."

WHICH BRINGS US to the most important questions of all. What is going on in Iraq? And how do the images from Fallujah inform us or confuse us, add to or subtract from our understanding?

Last Thursday, ABC News issued an update to a poll it had conducted several weeks earlier in Iraq. The poll results showed that Anbar, the province of which Fallujah is a part, is far more anti-American than Iraq as a whole, and that the attacks must be seen in that light. For instance, 82 percent in Anbar said that the invasion was "wrong," compared with 39 percent of all Iraqis. More to the point, 71 percent of those in Anbar said it was "acceptable" to attack coalition forces, and 56 percent said it was all right to attack foreigners working with the American-led coalition government. The numbers for Iraqis as a whole were 17 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

At the same time, though, American support for President Bush’s handling of the war continues to drop. According to the latest CBS News survey, Americans disapprove of Bush’s Iraq policy by a margin of 49 percent to 44 percent — an enormous falloff from last May, when 72 percent approved and just 20 percent disapproved. Fallujah is only one of many pieces of information the public is now trying to process, including former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke’s statements that the Bush administration did not take the threat from Al Qaeda seriously enough, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s upcoming congressional testimony, and word from the 9/11 commission that the terrorist attacks of that day might have been preventable.

A little more than a year ago, American-led forces invaded Iraq. We were told that our troops would take away Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and that the people of Iraq would greet US forces with cheers and flowers.

Now we know that there are no weapons, and that a sizable part of the population hates us. If Iraq was not a terrorist threat to the United States before, it is today. And now we are confronted with the paradigmatic images of our misadventure, images far more powerful and authentic and horrifying than that video of Saddam’s statue being pulled down in Sadr City — the very same Sadr City where we are now at war with the people we’d supposedly liberated.

What do those pictures say? What are they trying to tell us? It’s too soon to tell. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens is right. Perhaps those charred bodies hanging from the green-painted bridge are telling us that the horrors of Iraq were unavoidable — that we had to pay a heavy price, and are paying it still, to rid the world of Saddam’s unique brand of evil.

But perhaps they’re telling us something else. Perhaps they are telling us that this is the inevitable consequence of a failed policy, of an unnecessary war and an arrogant occupation that is breeding hatred and violence.

Every war, eventually, gets the images it deserves.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his daily Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.