WHAT IS AARON BROWN'S PROBLEM?

I just watched CNN's Aaron Brown bitching out the Washington bureau chief of Al-Jazeera for airing footage of slain and captured American soldiers. I haven't followed the story, but this whole thing makes me very nervous. CNN's version of the war so far is not the version that the rest of the world is seeing. If you're not persuaded of that fact, go to Spain's El Mundo (for example) and see the pictures of civilian and American casualties that the Pentagon does not want you to see and that CNN does not want to air, for reasons that you may in fact believe are decent or laudable. While the American version of the war shows smiling and relieved refugees, however, the rest of the world is seeing pictures of civilian and American casualties.

I agree with Atrios that what CNN has been showing (what I've seen of it) is "war porn": gratuitous pictures of war violence that have a certain kind of obscenity about them. I don't think that El Mundo's coverage is necessarily any different (I'm not really sure). But we kid ourselves if we think that we are seeing the same images of the war as the rest of the world; in the rest of the world, brutal pictures of both civilian and military casualties are circulating; instead of having an incentive to prove the administration's claims about the surgical nature of the war, other media outlets have incentives to disprove their claims. And now Aaron Brown and the CNN staff are explicitly (rather than in a subtle fashion) toeing the adminstration's line on war coverage, acting like the administration's attack dogs. That's sad. Not particularly unexpected, but sad nonetheless.

NOTE: Kieran Healy picks up on this as well and also has excerpts from the transcript. From Atrios.

See also the comments at the Wage Slave Journal.