MEDIA MADNESS
By Mickey Skidmore, ACSW
Normally during this time of year the talk around the office water cooler or coffee pot centers around the basketball tradition of “March Madness” as the new NCAA champion is about to be crowned. However, with the recent geo-political events, the focus of the world has turned to Iraq – and rightfully so. Yet, by the end of the first week of this conflict, I found myself increasingly uneasy and disturbed by the media’s coverage of this action.
In part, we have the Gulf war of ten years ago to thank for this. This was the first time the world could watch the war live on CNN, and it captivated us. We celebrated the swift and precise conclusion of military conflict in about 30 days time. For operation Iraqi Freedom, the pentagon has agreed to unprecedented access by the media in the form of "embedded" reporters who actually travel with various military units throughout the conflict.
While there may have been any number of justifications for such access, I believe we may be experiencing some unintended and negative consequences, some of which I will expand upon below:
1) The intensity and saturation of the media coverage has further contributed to the growing desensitization to violence and trauma for many Americans. When war is reduced to video-game mentality, I think we need to ask some hard questions.
2) It seems to me that we have inadvertently transformed this war into a sports-like form of entertainment. The troops “performances” are actually being televised, and then we interview them afterwards much like we would the player of the game. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we have press conferences on a daily basis with military representatives offering play-by-play analysis.
3) Recently, the newest development in this madness, is the media’s second guessing the strategies of our military leaders. There is clearly a role for media to scrutinize, and at times criticize military decisions, however, in my view the media is only contributing to further complicating the efforts of our military leaders. On one hand, it’s minimally a huge distraction from the focus at hand, while on the other, a worse case scenario – the makings of a second war – one between the pentagon and the media.
4) In contrast to my first concern, I also believe that ongoing media coverage of this war at some level contributes to traumatizing our national psyche at some level.
War is an experience that cannot be adequately put into words or shared, unless you have had the misfortune to experience it first hand. War changes those who participate in it in profound ways. To present these images in real time on television is nothing short of media madness. The results are traumatizing our own national psyche with images of war and violence, or in an effort to cope, drawing upon our defense mechanisms to reduce these images to something in between a video game or sport-like entertainment event. The former is the last thing we need after the shock of 9/11. The latter unfortunately minimizes and devalues the military reality of this crisis.
Somewhere in all this, we are all relying on the ethical principals of responsible journalism that can somehow find a reasonable balance of providing relevant information and keeping us informed without some of these negative consequences.
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