Media Ethics

[Delta4Embassy]

Was gonna call it journalism ethics, but c'mon, tv news isn't journalism.

Is it ethical to blur out the dead bodies on war coverage news segments? If the point of such coverage is to show the horror of war, isn't that point being lost by not showing the result of war? Does it actually make war seem 'less-bloody' by concealing the blood and blown apart human beings, the dead children with heads blown apart, and the like?

Is the US' continuous state of war for over a dozen years now in part due to our being much more okay with war? We don't see the result most of us because our news feeds of the wars are censored. If we all saw the dead mutilated bodies of both sides wouldn't we be more against such things?

I'm always put in mind of the original Star Trek episode about two planets embroiled in a centuries long war who've gone digital and now the war unfolds in their respective supercomputers like a simulation, but with real casualties reporting sheep-like to disintegration booths. They made war clean and sanitary so they never had a need to end it. When Captain Kirk destroys the computers, both sides scream and protest that Kirk has now brought back the horror of war. To which he cooly responds something like, "Well now either you can sue for peace, or start building bombs."

I used to worry we were headed that direction, but think I missed the reality that we're already there. We have never-ending warfare because few of us experience the horror of war so have no reason to oppose it. War's an abstraction because the reality's hidden.

We should end media censorship of violence and gore on tv news programs. Violence and death is bad. It shouldn't be presented as cleanly as possible. It's SUPPOSED to offend us and shock us, that's because it's bad.

 

[Pogo]

Continuous state of war for over a dozen years? Check your math.
Jesse Ventura likes to point out the US has been in a continuous state of war for his entire lifetime, and he was born in 1951.

Our media, because it's commercial, has no room for 'ethics'. Its objective is to make money through attention. To that end it will sanitize, gloss over, pixelate, or just flat-out ignore any kind of reality disturbing enough to rouse the rabble away from their remote controls. So their interest is to keep the public (read: customers) in a permanent stupor of Soma.

Aldous Huxley and George Orwell saw it coming.