studio36uk wrote:
If you are going to really "KNOW WAR" you have to "SHOW WAR"

The current administration is robbing us of that opportunity...every photographer is being censored who shoots over there.



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Andy, I agree that when anything involving much thought process is brought up on this forum people here don't much like to discuss it anymore.

James Jackson wrote:
The current administration is robbing us of that opportunity...every photographer is being censored who shoots over there.

It's NOT the photographers being censored; or the news reporters either; at least not in the field... though they are restricted in where they can go and when. News control, and control of the news, starts a lot closer to home.

You don't see in the US what we see on British TV... but for the most part the BBC et al only covers the British military... and we have seen the dead, the injured, the displaced and our own soldiers escaping in flames from buildings and even armoured personnel carriers, and a lot more of the "action."

At the start of the current conflict a Brit photo-journalist even went walkabout on a "personal statement" of his experience in the Iraq TO and came away with a half hour TV special including being caught in a fire fight and with film of soldiers fighting and dying in living colour + sound that was broadcast here in prime time as a news special. Also when journalist John Simpson, BBC's Senior Political Correspondent, and his party, got bombed from the air [by friendly fire] it hit our TV screens in all it's glory, or, non-glory as the case may be... the camera kept rolling including with the blood spatter on the camera lens... and film of their military escorts and their own wounded film crew. Broadcast on several occasions.

The Brit press can get squeamish about certain things [e.g. krispie critters at breakfast time - like the Fallujia security contractor incident - which WAS shown at later news hours and in the print media INCLUDING the mob attacking the corpses] but general war coverage here is a LOT more graphic than anything you see in America. The only reason we don't see more of it, and a lot more, is because the editing decisions are made in London and not in the field by the actual reporters on the scene.

The American public are being treated like mushrooms* for a reason... if they were to see real war - like the Vietnam coverage - support for the US government's position on Iraq [at least,] if not the government itself, would evaporate just as it did in 1968/69 and onwards.

* Kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

Studio36