Reaction paper for Comm 120: Law and the Mass Media (submitted 27 July 2002)

The crown prince of shock rock said it best: "Things have not become more violent. They have become more televised."

Marilyn Manson has a point. The Good Book is itself replete with accounts on violence: Cain killing Abel in a fit of jealousy, John the Baptist's head on a platter, Christ's crucifixion. The Bible is a testament to human sacrifice. Why should our newspapers, TV shows and websites be any different? The media are there to tell the truth. Journalist Daniel Pearl was brutally murdered by Pakistani terrorists in front of a rolling camera. It wasn't pretty, but it was factual.

But there is something else the media are there for. The media are there for the citizens, to safeguard their rights, to guide society toward understanding and making enlightened choices. The media uplift humanity. In Europe more than anywhere else, graphic photographs and film footage have no place in the news on the grounds that they violate the individual's right to dignity.

One may cite the pile of corpses from the Holocaust, the skulls of Pol Pot's Cambodia, even the New Yorkers jumping from the Twin Towers to their doom on 9/11. Grade school children read about them in textbooks, watch documentaries on the Discovery Channel about them. Thousands followed the news on CNN and watched HBO's In Memoriam. Don't those people have rights, too? Of course they do. Then why not fuss over them?

For one thing, those victims enjoy - if one could put it that way - relative anonymity. Perhaps Anne Frank's bones are there somewhere, in the mound to the left. We know who she was, what she wrote in her diary, that she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But we will never know for sure which of the emaciated bodies strewn across the ground or heaped on the death cart is hers. We cannot assign correct names and personalities to all those dead in Auschwitz, Ukraine or Uganda. We cannot even tell if the person who jumped off the East Tower's nth floor was a man or a woman. Anonymity may well be the only dignity left to someone dying a pitiful death.

Daniel Pearl did not have that dignity, was not given that dignity. I have not seen the video myself, but those who have say that he was clearly identified. In fact, he makes a little speech before his head is suddenly sawed off his body. His death was all the more horrific because his killers were not mechanical entities or otherwise inanimate objects like the hijacked airplanes of 9/11. He was killed by actual human beings (in a purely biological and anthropomorphic sense, of course). His death was a nightmare captured on celluloid.

It all makes for a gorefest unsuitable for even the strong of stomach. And by providing links to the footage in streaming video, the Boston Phoenix website has made potentially traumatic material available to all who care to look. Even people who aren't looking for a date with vomit are only a mouseclick away from one, thanks to spam senders who will mail you the URL the way they mail things with subject lines like "Hot Young Babes in Summer Camp Orgy." And since most youngsters have email accounts (not all email providers require their users to be over 13, and even if they did, it would still be easy to fake your birthdate), nobody is spared.

Lest we forget, Pearl's family openly disapproved of publicizing the video. In the absence of instructions from the deceased, the wishes of his bereaved should be respected.

But how can one report Pearl's death without the handy visual aids? Thanks to humans' short attention spans, a news piece must grab the viewer's attention within the first seven seconds in order to hook him. But grabbing someone's attention does not have to include inducing nausea. Likewise, the rule in journalism and literature is "show, not tell," not "show his spilled guts and severed jugular, not tell." To hook the audience, the media must come up with non-graphic ways to work the emotion factor. A bloodstained rag doll amid the debris of an African village massacre can be more poignant than the bullet-riddled body of its owner - and it's less prone to unpleasant interpretations from sectors such as the Ku Klux Klan. An image does not have to be gruesome in order to be powerful, to effectively convey a message.

In defense of In Memoriam, former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Americans were obliged to watch the 9/11 documentary so as not to sanitize their collective memory. Watching the Pearl video can do that, as well as not watching In Memoriam. By this, not only do I mean the possibility that the pervasiveness of graphic material will numb our senses, but I also refer to America's selective amnesia when it comes to its history of aggression in foreign lands of which Kashmir, Vietnam, Palestine and Afghanistan are only a few. America has a blind spot that explains why terrorism by anyone else is called diplomacy when authorized by US leaders. Allowing the Pearl video to be shown might make that blind spot grow.

Again, the media must report the truth - and in order to do so, it must provide a context, a framework in which to analyze the event. Pearl's death certainly did not occur in a vacuum. Prof. Luis Teodoro often tells his journalism students that "terrorism is the weapon of the desperate." What caused that desperation, that hostility toward Americans? It must have been something the Americans did. American intervention in Kashmir? The media should provide a primer on American foreign policy (minus the doublespeak) as background. The Muslims in Pakistan, in Basilan believe in an eye for an eye. Retaliation of this sort comes easily when entire nations have been blinded. The Pakistani who killed Pearl might have witnessed his own loved ones die in the name of American foreign policy, through disease or starvation or possibly at the hands of US soldiers themselves. We'll never know, never understand, never learn unless the media help.

To show the video on its own is courting danger. As Poniewozik said in his Time magazine essay, the emotions the video appeals to may trigger extreme patriotism and US-centricism, spelling disaster for ethnic minorities in the US in general and South/Central Asians in particular. The days immediately after 9/11 saw nationalism built up to a fever pitch; everybody wanted to go to war. Considering the volatile state of US relations with countries with nuclear capabilities, it would be dangerous to push the envelope further by publishing the video. Without the proper context, the message Pearl died to give would be lost in a war waiting to happen.

Well, then, what is this message Pearl's death illustrate? That we - the Philippines, America, the world's so-called democracies - created Pearl's captors, the Taliban, even quasi-terrorist Abu Sabaya and his gang with our own hands? That we, in essence, signed the death warrants of Daniel Pearl, of Martin Burnham? In that case, the celluloid nightmare is no match for the one we live in.