Quote:
Originally posted by CaptainCrunch@Sep 30 2004, 05:10 PM
I don't think there's any other way around it. the media has no choice but to report the news, the public has a complete right to know.
My esteemed collegue the troutman is right . . . partially. If they weren't reporting these kidnappings and executions, the Terrorists would have to become far more extreme. However they run the risk of the public becoming desensitized to what they're doing now so they are eventually going to have to do something more extreme to keep themselves in the media's focus.
How soon until we see a video taped flaying, or live burning.
The media would only really be aiding these butchers if they gave them the airtime to convey thier views, or if the mainstream media was actually showing the executions, so any aid that they're giving is accidental and can't be helped unless the media is willing to compromise thier standards and ethics.
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I posted a story a few weeks ago which indicated the Breslan school massacre was in part a reaction to the fact western television audiences are becoming increasingly hard to shock.
Hence an escalation in the shock value.
Yet we see that editors DO shield audiences - for reasons of audience taste for the most part - from the worst of war even though a network like al-Jazeera makes a living off the most brutal of images that are accepted culturally by its audience.
Most networks, as one example, provided a link to the video of the first American beheading in Iraq (Nick Berg) although not broadcasting the images directly, essentially giving the viewer a choice to deliberately seek it out.
Lately, I don't think networks are providing such links. No more shock value?
This particular article above is likely a reaction to the lingering fate of the British hostage in Iraq and the images that periodically come out of his pleas for help.
Is the media simply lengthening his agony by giving the kidnappers an international forum even though they'll kill him in the end anyway?
As a sidenote, CNN the other day had a special on how soldiers adjust from returning from a killing mode. They open with a sequence showing American soldiers laughing it up as they shoot to death an injured Iraqi Fedaheen lying on the ground on a street corner. No censorship there. And I wasn't shocked.
Cowperson