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World view - Michela Wrong wants more corpses on television
Published 26 April 2004
Television should show us more corpses from Iraq. The sight of what violence can do to the human body is the most potent anti-war message around
That's it, I've had enough. I've been shouting in fury at my television set like a Mr Angry of Tunbridge Wells. Frankly, I'm sickened and disgusted by the outrageous lack of graphic violence on our screens today.
As the siege of Fallujah and the duel between coalition forces and Moqtada al-Sadr's militiamen have dragged on, we've watched US choppers rattling across the sky, marines opening fire in an eerie green glow and panicking convoys of cars heading out. What we haven't seen are the bodies.
We are told that the civilian death toll in Fallujah alone has reached at least 800. Well, you could have fooled me. All I've seen are some sheet-swathed forms lined up outside a hospital, a few fresh graves, a pair of Iraqis carrying a blanket weighed down by something heavy and wet.
What a strangely empty place the Iraq on our screens seems, with its deserted streets and vast explosions that leave no carcasses behind. Does anyone actually live there?
None of this is new. Think back to the television coverage of the war itself. How many dead bodies do you remember? A dozen, perhaps? Most of those were filmed from a distance or stayed on screen for no longer than a split second. Yet according to the global health organisation Medact, between 21,700 and 55,000 Iraqis died between March and October.
This prudish horror of death's physicality is a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon affliction. Anyone who has watched the news in France or Italy will know that viewers there are treated to a far higher level of gore. In those countries, wars look like wars. People bleed. You hear them scream. Here, broadcasters prefer their wars to look like computer games, all technological gimmickry and special effects. In this nerdy universe, we may well see the cause, but we rarely glimpse the effects.
Due out next month, a report by researchers at Cardiff University School of Journalism highlights the great irony of British television coverage in times of conflict.* Reporters "embedded" with the British or US troops invading Iraq initially fretted that the military would censor their reports. In the event, most censorship was carried out by the media themselves, convinced the public would be unable to stomach war's grim reality.
Why did the reporters and news editors do the military's work for it? "Taste and decency" was the mantra chanted by those interviewed in the report. But definitions of what is "acceptable" have shifted dramatically in the past ten years - for all, it seems, but newsmakers. Can they really believe that a public which didn't baulk at Saving Private Ryan, and tunes in for regular servings of body parts with CSI, cannot cope with a corpse?
"Ah yes, but that's made up," the editors would no doubt reply. "The viewer knows the difference." In one way, they are right. A real corpse packs a uniquely sobering punch. Death, up close and personal, is both far more banal and more shocking than you expect. Unless you nurse latent psychopathic tendencies, the sight of what violence can do to the human body puts you right off. The experience of war is, in itself, the most potent anti-war message around.
As a child, I used to be mortified by my mother's habit of intervening in schoolboy fights. She would bring the car screeching to a halt and be out on the pavement in a flash to separate two brawling boys. She had grown up in northern Italy during the war and seen Nazi atrocities in her home town. She would not stand for violence.
At the time, I covered my eyes in embarrassment. Now, having seen my own share of blood and guts, I share her revulsion. I despise film-makers such as Quentin Tarantino, who titillate their audience with the depiction of casual slaughter. But that is precisely why I want to see far more of the real thing. We are literal-minded creatures. To believe something, we need to see it: dry statistics will not do. Imagine how the Holocaust would have gone down in history if those photographs of matchstick bodies, piled like kindling inside the concentration camps, had been binned by nervous editors.
In a conflict in which one section of the population - the Iraqi civilians - is now doing almost all the dying, the failure to show the victims carries with it a huge implicit bias in favour of the aggressor. In opting to broadcast a "tasteful" war, broadcasters cannot kid themselves they are making politically neutral decisions.
Whether you voted in parliament for the war, marched against it on the streets or simply watched from the sidelines, you are entitled to see the consequences of the British government's decision to invade. It is time the people who give us our television news gave their audience a chance to see the world as it is.
* Too Close for Comfort: the role of embedded reporting during the 2003 Iraq war (Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies)
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