American movies feature scenes of people being blown up and gunned down; American TV programs show women being shot in the face. But television executives believe that when it comes to real war, Americans cannot bear to see bullet-ridden bodies and headless corpses. If they were shown, moreover, the effect might be to weaken support for the war. In the case of Iraq, the conflict Americans saw was highly sanitized, with laser-guided weapons slamming into their intended targets with great precision. We observed this from afar, usually in pictures taken from bombers thousands of feet above their target, or in images of clouds of black smoke rising hundreds of yards away. Spared exposure to the victims of war, Americans had little idea of its human costs.
Michael Massing,
Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq
The American Press & the Iraq War
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