COMMUNITIES AGAINST CAPITALISM
 

Civilian Casualties Simply 'Aren't News'
By Matt Bivens  Moscow Times Nov. 12, 2001

Here is the text of a memo circulated to editors of a small-town Florida
newspaper:

"DO NOT USE photos on Page 1-A showing civilian casualties from the U.S.
war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and
received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like ...

"DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S.
war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If
the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT. The
only exception is if the U.S. hits an orphanage, school or similar facility
and kills scores or hundreds of children."

The memo can be found on www.fair.org, the web site of FAIR, a media
watchdog group. There one can also read that the chairman of CNN has argued
it would be "perverse" to focus on civilian casualties, and has instructed
reporters to, basically, justify such deaths with editorializing commentary.

One memo at CNN offers sample language for news anchors to close out such
reports: "We must keep in mind ... that these U.S. military actions are in
response to a terrorist attack that killed close to 5,000 innocent people
in the United States."

Other journalists have argued that civilian casualties simply "aren't
news." On Fox television's "Special Report with Brit Hume" last week, for
example, Hume wondered if the deaths of women and children should be "big
news," because "civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part
of war, really."

Mara Liasson from National Public Radio and Michael Barone of U.S. News &
World Report both agreed. "Look, war is about killing people. Civilian
casualties are unavoidable," Liasson said. "Civilian casualties are not, as
Mara says, news," Barone said.

I read all this as moral and intellectual cowardice. Of course civilian
casualties are news, and of course they require no accompanying
editorializing. Just report what is happening! I'm bewildered that there
are journalists out there arguing otherwise.

Consider this: For several years now, the United Nations has been feeding
about a third of Afghanistan, or about 7.5 million people, nearly all of
them women and children. The UN has in past been able to work with the
Taliban on this. (This is the part where I offer my obligatory "I hate the
Taliban too" comment.)

Since we began bombing Oct. 7, however, aid agencies have been warning that
the system of food supply into Afghanistan is in peril. There is no more
law and order; local UN truck drivers are afraid of being bombed; the
Taliban are ever-more suspcious of UN workers and are harassing them; in
short, a system upon which at least 7.5 million people depend is falling
apart. Aid workers talk of only being able to feed a half or a quarter of
that number, which is another way of saying we could very soon have from 3
million to 5 million dead women and children in Afghanistan.

Now if that happens, Americans and Russians will never be able to argue
that the war on terror was anything other than a war on Muslims. And if
that happens, we will have all "lost the war." Full stop.

So where are our journalists? If they don't have the morals to point to an
avoidable famine about to kill millions, then do they at least have the
patriotism to want to win the war?

Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, is a Washington-based
fellow of The Nation Institute [<http://www.thenation.com/>www.thenation.com].