The Inapposite Press

For the first seven years of the U.S. occupation of Japan, the military administration kept the islands under lock and key. No critical news escaped the previously fascist state, which was seen before the war as entirely unreceptive to democracy. All of the journalism sent to the world, and especially to America, was delivered via the military news agency, Stars and Stripes. Millions of letters were censored, if not destroyed.

If the American public had cared, at the end of the Second World War, about the suppression of civil rights in a land under military control, they certainly would have been aghast at the conditions in Japan. But out of this oppressive melee rose an open, democratic society.

Today, an analogous reconstruction is wholly impossible. A 24-hour-a-day media juggernaut has kept every facet of American troops’ behavior in check. Photos and videos have captured soldiers in various horrific poses: shoving elderly men, pointing guns at groups filled with women and children and shooting an Associated Press journalist—an act filmed with the journalist’s own camcorder. These tragedies may have been more frequent in postwar Japan, governed as it were by more permissive rules of engagement and heavy-handed orders from General Douglas MacArthur to secure American dominance of the social, cultural and political scene.

But CNN-level scrutiny has redefined what was once only a military affair. By focusing on setbacks, this model makes any situation look like a “quagmire”—the word of the day for President Bush’s detractors. Coverage of the way hundreds of thousands were fed and medicated in Somalia in 1992, for example, could not counterbalance the deaths of 18 servicemen and women, particularly not in a mission that seemed trivial for America’s national interest. Fear of another Somalia kept President Clinton at bay while France and Britain fumbled in Bosnia; and, unsure of itself, the world remained silent about Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Only late in the Balkan War did Clinton even begin to consider the concept of military ultimatums, which, when issued, ended the berserk conflict within three months.

It would be folly to assume, as some conservatives do, that the media is a one-headed conglomerate out to get Bush and his administration. Rather, it is best to consider the news media as the inheritor of H.L. Mencken’s tradition of journalistic pessimism. That is, in every situation, images of destruction, death and disaster are more newsworthy than the human interest story that tells the tale of Umm Qasr’s municipal elections. Frequently do we hear the mantra of violence in the press recited: antiwar activist Michael Moore, whose ilk dwells on this kind of negative outlook, retells it in Bowling for Columbine; Nancy Reagan and Lynne Cheney lament it in Congressional hearings; thousands of Americans daily note in passing one or another murder featured as the top story in the local newspaper. The more grandiose arena of Iraq merely offers a larger stage for the violence that captivates Americans, as well as the syndicates who report their news.

This angle in reporting foreign affairs has caused much distortion. Consider the former Yugoslavia. Instead of focusing on the rather boring Serbian retreat from its outposts in Kosovo, CNN and BBC regaled in airing errant U.S. bombs blowing trains off their tracks and careening into downtown Belgrade. And only after the broadcast of a certain amount of death and destruction against the people of Sarajevo was it acceptable for America and NATO to threaten a military barrage of their very own.

In this way, violence-oriented newscasts have so bowled over a nation that 300 American deaths in Iraq looks like a calamity—or quagmire—worthy of bringing down a presidential administration.

MacArthur, in his time, was rather lucky that the American public was so squarely behind the war, and that the law of the land gave him the authority to censor the news media as he pleased. Now, with the American populace enjoying the carnival-like violence emanating from a far-off place—and with a slate of Democratic hopefuls egging them on—an otherwise normal postwar reconstruction has turned into a bloody hell.

—Travis R. Kavulla ’06, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Mather House. He is an undergraduate fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.