CNN BEHAVES RESPONSIBLY: THEY'RE ALONE IN THAT

Virtually everyone has the same lead story tonight: a Marine is being held hostage by a group threatening to behead him. (Bizarrely, almost everyone is reporting this as a "terrorist act," but they refer to those who took him as a "militant group.")

The video released by those holding the Marine went first, and was aired immediately by -- wait for it -- al Jazeera. I'm shocked. The images from that video were not used by CNN on its 6 pm broadcast, and are not available as of 6:43 on its web site. They're explicit about this choice: they won't use the video (where his face would recognizable to anyone who knew him, and where his military ID is displayed), until they can get confirmation from the military, and (this is refreshingly responsible behavior) until they can get confirmation that his family has been notified.

ABC scrims (blurs to unrecognizability) the face, and deletes the face out of the military ID, but leaves the image so that you can see that it is, in fact, apparently a US military ID. Gosh, you say, that's a responsible alternative.

Yeah, grand. Except they make their editing people go to all that trouble -- then give the man's name in their report! And were any friends or family, in a panic, to then go to their web site, guess what they'd see there -- yup, you guessed it, the picture they so carefully blurred out for the broadcast is in the clear on the web. (on the home page.)

CBS just showed the face right out there in the clear. As they do on the web.

I remember this shot of Arnold and Maria Shriver the morning after he was elected Governor of California, and the press was, pardon the pun, pressing in on the two of them so aggressively she looked like she was about to panic -- I didn't blame her, they were threatening to suffocate the two of them. And I felt bad for her, but I also couldn't help wondering if, in that moment, she suddenly had any regrets for any of her behavior as a journalist.

I don't wish for any of these people that a family member be touched by terrorism, so that they might develop a little damn empathy. But I wish they might be able to feel it without that experience. Would it really kill them to wait until the Defense Department confirmed a family was informed before they aired pictures like this in the clear? Is it that hard for them to imagine what it would be like to get news like this from the television?

Maybe the next time they decide to read lists of the dead they should ask themselves how the families of those casualties got the news, and if they have any regrets themselves.

Comments

[Ron Hardin]

The reason not to publicize personal disaster news is not to protect feelings, so empathy isn't the issue ; it's so that information gets to the right people first, and they're not operating under the assumption that their loved ones are alive and well when somebody else knows better. That is, it avoids the risk that _somebody else_ hears about it first.

Jeez, ``feelings'' are taking over everything today, as a mode of analysis.

[Pata]

I just saw a report on CNN and I'm not sure I amseeing right. Michael Ware, a Time reporter, was "embedded" for a month with the "insurgents" and saw bomb factories, etc., while Americans and Iraqis were being killed by those bombs.

I'm stunned. Is this legal? It sure isn't moral or ethical.

[dauber]

Sometimes feelings are a perfectly legitimate reason to behave. You want something more practical? The military needs a chance to talk to POW families, but I'd rather not be more specific.

I saw the Time thing, and I was horrified by the use of the word "embed" but decided not to post on it until I saw his piece. Ever since that Atlantic article came out by the reporter who'd spent a great deal of time with the insurgents in Fallujah, I was stunned that no one asked him as he made the rounds -- DO YOU NOT SEE A SMALL PROBLEM WITH THIS? But no one seemed to. Well, I did. But to see it, to label it, as the equivalent as "embedding?" I keep wondering if reporters would have embedded with Panzer units and not thought twice about it.

[Ron Hardin]

That's what I said, I think. It's a matter of information flow, not feelings. That's true in general, military or not. The media play it as feelings because they play everything as feelings, and frame any periodic self-examination to the question of news versus feelings, as if these were being balanced rather than both hyped.