The Ostrich Syndrome

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Don’t Sanitize Our News. We Did It, We Should Own It

Letter to the Editor
The Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal, 4/26/11

To the Editor:

I was glad to read HJ managing editor Charlie McCollum’s discussion of graphic photos in the Sunday’s newspaper [“Sensationalism played no part in publication of photo,” Sunday, 4/24/11]. Specifically, the question was about running the image of a bloody Syrian boy shot in the head by troops during a protest.

Like many HJ readers, I caught my breath when I saw the photo. I’d seen it the night before on NBC’s evening news, but the broadcasters had fuzzed out the gore. And there it was on my kitchen counter, in all its bloody detail.

But Charlie’s right in supporting the decision to run it. And if the photo made HJ readers mad, then all the more so.

Much of the problem with the way this country makes policy is that it happens in a safe, sanitized vacuum. We aren’t permitted to see the coffins coming home in the middle of the night from our foreign wars. We don’t want to see the outcomes of policies conducted in our name—and in our ignorance—that end in deaths and despair.

Out of sight and out of mind has become our national attitude toward unpleasant realities. Too many news organizations recognize this, and sanitize the news to “protect” us from unpleasantness. For years, international versions of U.S. news media—CNNi, Newsweek international and more—have offered global audiences much more complete, and graphic, reports on war and violence than appear in U.S. editions. We Americans apparently don’t have the stomach to confront the world—and our role in it.

In either the news media or ourselves, this ostrich mentality is dishonest. People—like that child murdered in Syria while demonstrating for the kind of freedom we say we support as a universal right—are fighting and dying, or living in horrible conditions and dying slowly all over the world. Often, these struggles have something to do with policies of our own government. They are far from our clean and safe kitchen counters, and too far from our consciousness.

Americans need more, nor less, awareness of the struggles and conflicts that are central to the lives of so many people worldwide. Seeing and hearing about those people is the responsibility of the press, and it's our responsibility not to turn away. We need and deserve more reality in the news media, please, not less, and must learn to take responsibility for our own role in it.

—Ted Pease
Petersboro