Sunday, May 09, 2004

The New York Times > Week in Review > All News Is Local, Too:
"…yet more photographs were coming to light.

The new images, published in The Washington Post on Thursday, were more graphic than the first set, and as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld fielded tough questions on Friday about the scenes, it was made clear that worse was yet to come."

“Be on notice,” Mr. Rumsfeld told a Senate committee. “There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist. If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse.”

It would also be the latest in a string of disturbing images from Iraq that Americans, unlike much of the rest of the world, are not accustomed to seeing.

Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, said in an e-mail message, “The American people from the beginning have been getting a sanitized vision of the Iraq war, and for those who depend on images for most of their impressions of the war, therefore a somewhat distorted vision.”

A recent poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland appears to support that view. Asked to estimate the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war in March and April of last year, 41 percent of respondents guessed below 500. Nearly 75 percent said 2,000 or below. No official toll exists, but even the lowest estimates put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths in the month after “major combat” began at more than 3,000. Last June, The Associated Press guessed that 3,240 Iraqi civilians died in March and April of last year. Iraq Body Count, an independent group tracking reports of civilian casualties, puts the number at more than 7,000.

Some say the American press has contributed to this hazy picture.

“To cover war without noticing death is like covering a sporting event without noticing the ball,” said Jim Naureckas, an editor at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a left-leaning group.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/weekinreview/09zell.html

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