Undersides of Media Fascination with Violence

Days after the horrible killings on the campus of Virginia Tech, the grisly stories and photos began to recede from the nation's front pages. News of carnage on a vastly larger scale — the war in Iraq — resumed with media prominence. The overall coverage of lethal violence, at home and far away, reflects the profound ambivalence and problematic standards of the American media establishment.

War sometimes comes across in news accounts as a tragic drama that alters the lives of American soldiers. Once in a while, the reporting conveys a bit of the anguish of civilians who are caught in the crossfire. Rarely does the coverage even attempt to suggest the human aspects of fighters who are resisting American troops. But in the world of U.S. mainline journalism, the boilerplate legitimacy of American violence in Iraq is a routine assumption.

In sharp contrast, when a mentally unstable person goes on a shooting rampage in the United States, no one questions that such actions are intrinsically, fundamentally and absolutely wrong. The media condemnation is, as it should be, 100 percent.

However, even after years of a U.S. war effort in Iraq that has been increasingly deplored by the American public, the standard violence directed from the Pentagon does not undergo much critical scrutiny from American journalists.

Even when the president's war policies come under withering media fire, the daily activities of the U.S. armed forces are subjected to scant moral condemnation in the stateside press. Yet, under orders from the top, they continue to inflict violence far more massive than the shooting sprees that turned a placid Virginia campus into a slaughterhouse.

News outlets in the United States combine the totally proper condemnation of horrific killing at home with a notably different affect toward the killing abroad that is funded by the U.S. Treasury. Instead of condemnations, we often read, see and hear explicit media commendations — lauding as heroic the Americans in uniform who are trying to kill, and to avoid being killed, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In recent decades, the trends of war have been clear.

A majority of the dead — estimated at 75 to 90 percent of the fatalities — are civilians. They are no less innocent than the more than 30 people who suddenly died from gunshots at Virginia Tech.

It would be inaccurate to say that the bulk of U.S. media's coverage accepts war launched from Washington. Actually, in their reporting, the major news outlets of our country do much more than accept — they actively depict violence under the Pentagon's aegis as basically legitimate.

The ostensibly justifying mix is cultural, economic and political.

We grew up with — and continue to see — countless movies and TV programs showing how people with a handgun, a machine gun or a high-tech plane are able to set wrongs right with sufficiently deft and destructive violence.

The annual reports of large, medium and small companies boast that the U.S. Defense Department is a lucrative customer with more and more to spend on their wares for war.

And the scope of political discourse, echoed by major news outlets, ordinarily remains narrow enough to avoid examining the distinctions between "defense spending" and "military spending." Likewise, the big media outlets rarely explore the terrain of moral challenges to the politics of a de facto warfare state.

Everyone who isn't deranged can agree that what happened on April 16, 2007, at the campus of Virginia Tech was an abomination. It came about because of an individual's madness. We must reject it without the slightest equivocation. And we do.

But the media baseline is to avoid harsh judgments when the activities of the U.S. military — yesterday, today and tomorrow — bring so much bloodshed to Iraq. The social dynamics in our own midst, fueling the war effort, are spared tough scrutiny. At best, the media approach is ambivalence and equivocation. We are constantly encouraged to accept.

We swim through the media, and we are used to it. But people from many other countries, when they visit the United States, are apt to remark on how the U.S. media environment strangely affirms war as a national way of life.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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