To air or not to air

(note: no links here. Just less-than 1000 words about pictures, and some disturbing pictures at that. If you want them, you're resourceful, go find 'em yourself.)



Of course the big story this week is the appalling beheading of Nick Berg, captured on video. The mainstream U.S. media have come to a rough consensus of how much to air of this grisly document. Meanwhile, it's mirrored in many places on the Net. This comes after a week's worth of seige on the breakfast-table-standard in the form of photos of Abu Ghraib prison abuses. Meanwhile the National Review's Jonah Goldberg is calling for the Berg tape to be shown as widely as the Abu Ghraib photos were, and claims CBS has Berg's blood on its hands for airing the photos.



Elsewhere, lost in the week's events is news that the Justice Department is reexamining the Emmett Till murder case. Till, as you may remember, was a 14-year-old from Chicago lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. When he was found, he was identifiable only by an initialed ring. The circumstances of Till's death were not all that unusual in the hundred years or so following the Civil War. What made the case a national issue--and galvanized the civil rights movement--was the remarkable decision by Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, to have an open-casket funeral for her son. Thousands lined up to pay their respects. Jet magazine published photos of Emmett's body, shocking readers nationwide. Those photos, too, are on the Web, and are still haunting.



And so back to Berg, haunting enough while still alive. When are shocking images necessary?I think it's when they are instructive. The Till case and other lynchings that the NAACP publicized taught America, at least the part of white America that cared to listen, that the country's policy of institutional racism had a human toll. The Abu Ghraib lesson is that the US cannot be successful if it abandons the very values it seeks to export. And how is that unamerican? Making us better is as important as making the world better for us. And easier, too.



What lesson is to be learned from airing the Berg video? That al-Qaeda's evil? We learned that one three Septembers ago. That, as said elsewhere, we're not as bad as the worst people on the planet? Hey, there's a helluva lesson. Or maybe the lesson is that because of the administration's ineptitude in conducting the war, the U.S. has allowed al Qaeda to regroup and strengthen in the Middle East. But somehow I think that is not a lesson Goldberg has in mind. In any case, I reject Goldberg's position that the publicly airing the prison images caused Berg's death. Know what's a step away from that sort of thinking? The notion that we should continue to abuse Iraqi prisoners so we're not seen as "appeasers."