The furor over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nipple exposure seems to have died down. I personally thought that the reaction was overblown. Once you’ve seen one nipple, you’ve seen them all. The rest of the half-time show was much more offensive to me. However, I don’t see any part of the show as reflecting the decline of civilization.
To see an example of the decline of civilization, one needed only to read Sunday’s New York Times for April 4. There on the first page of a back section was a color photograph of three Iraqi boys either pointing to, or cheering because of, a human penis hanging from a telephone line. The NYT helpfully informed us that it was a “body part” removed from one of the four Americans whose death in Fallujah last week was the opening round in the current Iraqi counterattack against their American occupiers.
Remembering the NYT motto of “All the News that’s Fit to Print” and remembering that during Europe’s Dark Age, Baghdad was a world center of learning in medicine and mathematics, I find it hard to determine where civilization has declined the most.
It’s not that the NYT doesn’t have the right to publish the picture (they do), it’s that the publication adds nothing to our knowledge of Iraq, the insurgents, or anything else while being offensive to the relatives of the deceased. It’s not illegal. It’s just not a decent thing to do.
Sensationalism sells.
I agree with you. The horror of family members seeing the image should be thought of.
You are SO awesome - will you be my dad, too?
while i agree with orange and fully, i want to point out (as riverbend does so much more eloquently) that one of the things the western media has been reproached for is the resistance to show what is really happening in iraq, for some weirdly protective fear of “hurting americans’ feelings.” the european media has fewer scruples about portraying devastation and death. when soldiers go into a chechneyan refugee camp firing, we see blood and body parts. on prime time TV.
as tasteless as the NYT photo choice may be, i’m not sure the editorial decision to run that particular image is more to blame for the decline of civilization than the bloodthirsty urge to rip enemy soldiers limb from limb - or, for that matter, than the concept of bombing a foreign country in the first place. would it have been better if the NYT had run a photo of an arm? or a head? what should the newspaper have shown, in place of this severed penis, that would still demonstrate the barbaric realities of war?
Journalism and decency are usually very different things, aren’t they? I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
I had nightmares after seeing the mutilated bodies of the Hussein brothers on CNN in the Salt Lake City airport. There were six TV’s at the gate, loudly blasting descriptions of the images being shown. I had a book and some headphones to drown out the carnage, but I watched as little kids stared, mesmerized, at the screens. Please don’t think I am a Hussein sympathizer or something ridiculous like that. However, violence, regardless of good intentions, repulses me and I hate to think that those kids at the airport will grow up inured to violence against other people. Not like the kids who saw Janet Jackson’s breast—they’re scarred for life.
I was thinking about this a couple of days ago. There was a car accident at the corner and they had to cut the driver out, use the jaws of life, et cetera, and there was a little girl (maybe two or three) watching the whole process with her dad. As it turns out, the woman was pulled out of the car more or less intact, and not bloody or anything, but there’s no way the dad knew that. But somehow that’s socially acceptable for the kid to see, and a nipple isn’t…
I’m not exactly sure how it is that we seem to see more graphic depictions of violence and the results of violence than perhaps ever before in our history and yet...we seem to be less and less affected by it. Now this isn’t news of course, but it does beg the question, does seeing it make it any more realistic to us? Doe is it “bring it home” or does it in fact simply make us numb and shut down? I’m honestly still not convinced one way or the other. But as for decency...I must agree with Father Goose here...it certainly wasn’t decent.
Nicely put.
i agree that it was indecent. however, so is the whole Iraq war. unfortunately, some of us need to be “shocked” into realizing this isn’t some movie set - these are real lives being lost. if that sensationalism moves some people to oppose the violence in Iraq, then so be it.
I regularly check in here. It’s not a lot, I know, but it’s how I try to keep track of what’s happening in Iraq right now. And no, I don’t really know anyone serving over there right now (though I did in our previous excursion a decade ago). But it seems to me that this site, though well done, is far more obscene than any Superbowl half-time show.
I know I am almost a week late in reading this post and commenting on it, but I had to say: EXACTLY! Very good and valid points.