News and Commentary on Politics, Media and Culture

Yesterday, I heard on NPR that at least one of the soldiers charged with murdering an Iraqi man will not be subject to the death penalty. It was an interesting story in that it talked about the evidence, or lack thereof. At the heart of the case is a body so badly decomposed nothing can be discovered from it. It yields no clues. On one side of the body are Marines who confessed to a murder, but now claim that their confessions resulted from coercion. On the other side are claims from some Iraqis that these Marines seized this Iraqi man, killed him brutally, and tried to cover it up. The Iraqis refuse to give their statements in court. From a legal point of view, with no physical evidence, no witnesses, and confessions that may be the result of coercion, it’s not much of a case. As always, what’s more interesting is how the media handles it.

First off, I suspect without actually knowing that, during WWII (the last of the wars people believed in), the Press wouldn’t have reported this stuff at all. Wherever you have vast numbers of young men with guns and high stress levels, you’re going to have some crime, and some of those crimes are going to be awful ones. The Press would have understood the normalcy of this fact, and would either have ignored the stories altogether, or would have made the considered decision that reporting these inevitable outbursts of ugliness would be bad for morale. News focused on (a) battles and (b) bravery.

The paradigm is so different nowadays. Reporters are obsessed with death: how many of our soldiers have been killed and how many “innocents” our soldiers have killed. When our troops successfully route bad guys, it gets covered and forgotten. When a minute fraction of our troops are accused of having killed civilians the news keeps being regurgitated like a bad meal. (And keep it mind that it’s not always easy to tell whether the dead are, in fact, civilians. Witness the Hezbollah fighters who, upon death, were magically transformed into Lebanese civilians for body count purposes.

In any event, you don’t need to listen to the NPR story I listened to; you just need to read this little NPR summary:

U.S. military prosecutors in California have begun to lay out their case against seven Marines and a Navy corpsman. The servicemen are accused of committing murder while serving in Iraq.

The incident in town of Hamdaniya was one of several that has called attention to the conduct of American troops in Iraq. (Bolded emphasis mine.)

Don’t you love that insouciant language? It’s an “incident” that “called attention” to ” conduct.” That’s all. But cast your mind back to the press’s savage coverage of Abu Ghraib and Haditha. It’s as if, to the American Press, every member of our military would have cheerfully participated in the My Lai massacre. That’s it, guys and gals: you’re all mass civilian murderers, every one of you. There are no bad guys (aside from the American military, of course), there are only innocent civilians.

Related:
Wizbang: Nevermind - Article about the press and the forgotten correction in media reports.

[Read more and discuss this topic with Bookworm]

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