Quote:
Originally Posted by dynalow
Tom, I don't understand. Please elaborate a bit.
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There are some realities that people have a hard time looking at - death, suffering being chief among them. Since audiences find that disturbing, a lot of press is "sanitized" for widespread consumption. Its done before the press even gets their hands on it though - it started in Vietnam when there was a
PR nightmare over the gory images coming across television screens and newspapers. It certainly contributed to the domestic reaction of the war, and caused the U.S. to completely rethink press strategies going forward. In Grenada there was virtually no true press presence, everything came from the military press release office. In gulf war I, they had reporters over there, but nobody really got access to anything so again, not too many in-your-face images. In Gulf War II here, they switched to embedded journalism which has been hit-and-miss in that sense. Still a lack of access to images and info but there is a lot more of it. The images used to represent stories are often devoid of any blood, bodies, or any actual "reality" of the war. One of my colleagues in the grad program was a Major in the Army who ran the
PR office for them out of Afghanistan, he always had some interesting stories about this stuff. Larry's "out of sight out of mind" thing just triggered the response even though its admittedly a bit off topic.
My thesis is loosely around this phenomenon in regard to the OBL killing.