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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Yes, Bush Has a Policy on North Korea. It Might Even Work. (March 18, 2003) Bilateral talks could lead all too easily to precisely the catastrophe they're supposed to prevent. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Falsely Accused 'Enemies' Deserve Due Process (March 18, 2003) Congress should now force the administration to assign military tribunals to interview every detainee. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: A Worldwide Tide of Anti-Bush Feeling (March 18, 2003) The president's black-and-white vision is regarded as dangerously simplistic. By William Schneider. Media: Pyle On (March 11, 2003) Don't look for war with Iraq to produce the next Ernie Pyle, no matter how much embedding goes on. By William Powers. Wealth of Nations: Economics Is Against the War. But Economics Isn't Everything (March 11, 2003) The economic threat if Saddam were left in power is smaller now than it was when he occupied Kuwait. By Clive Crook. Legal Affairs: Is It Ever All Right to Torture Suspected Terrorists? (March 11, 2003) Suppose that Mohammed is taunting his interrogators by predicting an imminent, deadly attack. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: A Leadership Vacuum (March 11, 2003) That void poses more of a threat to post-Saddam Iraq than do Kurdish separatism and Islamic revolt. By William Schneider. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Civilian Casualties: A Media PrimerFive guidelines for assessing news reports of civilian casualties by William Powers ..... If there's a war in Iraq, civilians will inevitably be killed and wounded, and the media will deliver their stories to the American public. It will then be the public's job to make sense of those stories and decide what they say about the war. Sounds easy enough, but this can be a surprisingly tricky business. On the surface, civilian casualties seem to be a clear-cut sort of news: There was a war going on and innocent people died. Once you've learned the basics of who they were, where they died, and how, what else remains to be known? A lot, actually. Civilian casualties present enormous challenges for the media consumer. As we head into this war, and the onslaught of news it will bring, here are a few guidelines for understanding the grimmest news of all. 1. Skepticism rules. Civilian casualties not only occur under the most challenging journalistic conditions, but immediately become the subject of intense controversy and manipulation. Clean, unassailable facts are hard to come by. Stories conflict. Numbers go up and down. Charges and countercharges fly, and the media become, in spite of themselves, a major tool in the propaganda war. The hundreds of U.S. journalists now "embedded" with U.S. troops were granted this access partly because the Pentagon hopes that they will, through their reporting, mitigate the public-relations damage of any civilian casualties. For the news-watching public, this is treacherous terrain. It's essential to remember that, with many civilian-casualty incidents, the truth is always slippery and can remain so for years. 2. Be vigilant about language. As Carl M. Cannon notes in this week's cover story, the U.S. military has tried before to water down the meaning, and domestic impact, of civilian casualties, with language of devious opacity. The phrase "collateral damage" is notorious, but there are lesser variants that have the same effect, making the abominable seem downright benign. "Civilian casualties" itself is a pallid little phrase that evokes none of the horrors—or the human beings—it contains. Watch for reporters who know how to put flesh on those words. Sometimes, you don't even have to see the casualties up close to grasp their reality. In 1943, Life magazine's Margaret Bourke-White observed this scene from a Piper Cub airplane over war-wracked Italy: "Flying low, sometimes we could see Italian civilians picking through the sickening rubble that once had been their homes." 3. What's wrong with this picture? It's the key question to ask when a civilian-casualty story breaks. The war media have tics, tendencies, and prejudices that are not always helpful. For instance, Susan Moeller, a professor of media and international affairs at the University of Maryland, recalls that in Kosovo, if there was a massacre of 64 people in a particular village, the news reports would be along the lines of, "Sixty-four people were killed, four of whom were children under the age of 12," or "Sixty-four were killed, including a woman over 70." In one way, this is routine journalism, highlighting the most newsworthy facts. Since the young and the weak are the most defenseless civilians, they are by definition the most appalling victims of war. Or are they? "In a sense, what you have is the spokespeople, whether they're journalists or military spokespeople, effectively telling us there's a hierarchy of innocence," Moeller said. "There are people we should care more about. There are deaths that matter more. And what we have to think about as a public is whether we buy into this." 4. Distrust numbers. With civilian casualties, the numbers game is always tricky. This time, it's begun even before the war, with some opponents claiming there may be 500,000 civilian casualties, and some hawks arguing there will be few. Both are making it up. Once the war begins, the numbers will be a bone of enormous contention. Statistics concerning the dead and the wounded obviously matter, and 10 is not the same as 10,000. But there's a danger of allowing the numbers to take over. Like crowd estimates in news stories about political demonstrations, the numbers game is a public-relations battle between opposing camps, and it deserves only so much attention. "To try and see behind the numbers is the key to this," said Joel Best, a professor at the University of Delaware and author of the book Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists. "There's a tendency in our culture to treat numbers as little nuggets of truth, as though they're real, like rocks. I prefer to say that they're more like jewels. They are selected, they're cut, they're polished, and they're placed in settings so they can be viewed from particular angles.... With the best efforts in the world, these [civilian-casualty] numbers are going to be imperfect." 5. Go broad. Reporters often frame civilian-casualty stories to suit the interests of their home audience, so it's wise to surf the globe via the Web. "One of the things you should do if the war comes to pass is try to gather your information not just from as many news sources as possible but from as many nationalities as possible," said Moeller, who recommends the BBC; French and German wire services; Al Jazeera; and Iranian, Iraqi, and Turkish news outlets. "Are they roughly the same within a certain magnitude, or are they dramatically different? That's just general good sense, but particularly in this situation, it will be a useful exercise."
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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