Bias in Abuse Reporting

The media continues to only report about US abuses, not reporting on abuses by Sadaam. By only reporting things that makes the US look bad, the media hope to sway international opinion and the election in November. Kevin

The Saddam Torture Videos

The American Enterprise Institute held an unusual video screening yesterday, and hardly anyone showed up. One who did was the New York Post's Deborah Orin:

The video only lasts four minutes or so--gruesome scenes of torture from the days when Saddam Hussein's thugs ruled Abu Ghraib prison. I couldn't bear to watch, so I walked out until it was over.

Some who stayed wished they hadn't. They told of savage scenes of decapitation, fingers chopped off one by one, tongues hacked out with a razor blade--all while victims shriek in pain and the thugs chant Saddam's praises.

Saddam's henchmen took the videos as newsreels to document their deeds in honor of their leader.

But these awful images didn't show up on American TV news.

In fact, just four or five reporters showed up for the screening at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which says it got the video via the Pentagon. Fewer wrote about it.

We saw part of this video a few weeks back, and indeed it is every bit as horrific as Orin's fellow reporters describe. Our computer crashed about a third of the way through and we didn't have the stomach to start watching again after rebooting. So we can certainly understand why television news outlets would see it as unfit to air.

As Orin notes, this "raises a very complex problem in the War on Terror. It's worse than creating moral equivalence between Saddam's tortures and prisoner abuse by U.S. troops. It's that we do far more to highlight our own wrongdoings precisely because they are less appalling." As of yesterday, the New York Times had written 177 stories on Abu Ghraib — with over 40 on the front page. The self-proclaimed "paper of record" hadn't written a single story about those seven Iraqi men who had their hands chopped off by Sadaam.

Part of the problem may be that the press hasn't quite figured out how to deal with such "asymmetric propaganda," as Orin calls it. Yet it doesn't seem that it would be that hard to provide context--to make sure that every story about American abuses at Abu Ghraib also included graphic descriptions of what went on there before Iraq's liberation.

Why does the press harp on American abuses and ignore Saddam's? Orin quotes AEI's Michael Ledeen as saying it's because most journalists "want Bush to lose." Reporters, of course, are at pains to maintain an air of fairness, but surveys have demonstrated that most lean to the left.

If you listen to prominent Democrats like Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd and Al Gore, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they'd rather see America lose the war than the president win re-election. It's bad enough that one party is willing to engage in what as a practical matter amounts to anti-American propaganda. Surely we have a right to demand better from the news media.