The new media battlefield
Photos from Abu Ghraib prison have become instant icons, etched into our collective consciousness. Consider the cartoon by Scott Stantis in USA Today: the Statue of Liberty wearing a black hood with wires dangling from her fingers.
The power of imagery is not new, of course. From the victors raising an American flag on Iwo Jima to casualties draped across an American tank in Vietnam, pictures have long conveyed the heroism and horror of war.
But one thing is very new. Technological advances — digital cameras, satellites, the Internet — mean that virtually anybody, anywhere in the world, can take, transmit and receive these images at lightning speed. And the process will only accelerate with the spread of handheld devices capable of receiving ever-expanding amounts of information.
This means that the media battlefield, where ideas are the missiles and minds are the targets, is changing constantly. And it’s clear from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s testimony last week that he has been very slow to understand this new terrain.
In tones of shock and awe, Rumsfeld complained to the Senate Armed Services Committee: “We’re functioning … with peacetime constraints, with legal requirements, in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable pictures and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had … not even arrived in the Pentagon.”
Well, Mr. Secretary, get used to it. And learn at least one lesson: any attempts to withhold additional images from Iraq, no matter how embarrassing, are doomed to failure.
Questions of privacy and legal procedure are important. But America’s credibility around the world is far more important, and that’s what’s at stake. Besides, the images will come out anyway. That’s the nature of the new media battlefield, and democracies should be cheering, not fearing, this development.
The issue is far larger than the photos from Abu Ghraib. When the official chokehold of information is broken, the forces of freedom win far more often than they lose. People “running around with digital cameras” are bedeviling the Pentagon today, but tomorrow, they will be the foes of despotism everywhere.
In Iran today, nascent democratic forces are receiving information and inspiration from a group of exiles in California, who are using satellites to beam radio reports back into their homeland. In China, the Falun Gong spiritual movement is using the Internet to organize resistance to the Communist regime.
It’s not just tyrants who are losing control over information that their citizens need and deserve to know. The Bush administration tried to ban photos of coffins returning from Iraq. But a single airport worker, Tami Silicio, captured images of those casualties, and they were published in her hometown paper, The Seattle Times. And a single entrepreneur, Russ Kick, used the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose additional pictures from the Pentagon and publish them on his Web site, The Memory Hole.
CBS waited two weeks before broadcasting the Abu Ghraib photos after Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, cautioned that they could inflame tensions and cost American lives. When the new photos become available — and that’s when, not if — questions of taste and decency have to be balanced against the public’s right to know.
Here’s what’s not in question: the Bush administration has to learn to operate on this new media battlefield, or it will lose the war of images and ideas. And if that war is lost, military victories won’t matter.