This Memorial Day weekend finds Americans filled with sorrow and anger over a war that apparently has no end: sorrow for the thousands of wasted young lives, anger about the destroyed families across the land. The huge drop in support for President Bush’s disasterous war policy has alarmed officials within the administration and within the Pentagon. Their response? Control the message; prevent images of the cost of war in Iraq from reaching the American people:
"Many of the journalists who are in Iraq have been backed into fortified corners, rarely venturing out to see what soldiers confront. And the remaining journalists who are embedded with the troops in Iraq — the number dropped to 92 in May from 126 in April — are risking more and more for less and less. Since last year, the military’s embedding rules require that journalists obtain a signed consent from a wounded soldier before the image can be published. Images that put a face on the dead, that make them identifiable, are simply prohibited.
If Joseph Heller were still around, he might appreciate the bureaucratic elegance of paragraph 11(a) of IAW Change 3, DoD Directive 5122.5:
“Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without the service member’s prior written consent.”
Add to the restraints on journalists in Iraq the military restrictions on the use of blogs, MySpace, FaceBook and Flickr, and you control the volume of bad news from seeping out of Iraq. And some segments of the American "News" media are playing along with self-censorship:
What’s more important: Iraq or Anna Nicole Smith?
Depends on which network you’re watching.
According to PEJ’s first quarter News Coverage Index, "MSNBC and CNN were much more consumed with the war in Iraq than was Fox."
But not all of the news about the war is negative. The Boston Globe reports today on the surge in profits for the makers of military gravestones:
Another stretch of steady business has unfolded in recent years at Granite Industries, one of a handful of suppliers of veterans’ headstones for national cemeteries. The latest upswing […]reflects mounting losses in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The company turns out more than 100 gravestones for veterans every day, at a sprawling plant at the end of a woodsy, gravel-tossed road, close by a slender branch of the Winooski River. Its 50 workers say they take pride in crafting the veterans’ markers.
