| In response
to skeptics of the Las Vegas massacre who claim it was a false-flag operation
involving crisis actors because news photos, online images and social
media have not shown realistic gunshot wounds caused by high-velocity
munitions, I must here state that sort of argument arises from a severe
ignorance of media ethics about the release of images of graphic gore,
as discussed below.
The doubters have noted that patients released from hospital soon
after the Oct. 1 shooting are 'smiling (top) happily.'
So would you if your flesh had been hit by a mere fragment of
a bullet or a pebble of concrete dislodged by ordnance striking the
pavement. Despite any mood suppression from medication, you would be
overjoyed to be walking out of minor surgery knowing that your
injury is not life-threatening and just a surface wound expected to
heal within a few weeks. If there is something to smile about in our
troubled times, it's that one is still alive and kicking, or at
least doing better than those unfortunate victims of gunfire who
will be a lifelong paraplegic or sustain incurable trauma to the
brain, and they deserve comfort and support from all of us rather
than accusations of being crisis actors.
There are three immediate reasons photos of horrific wounds are not
bandied about in public: emotional trauma to victim families and
friends; the potential for encouraging more acts of terrorism; and
because blood and gore are not needed to get across the seriousness
of this issue.
Delusional Fantasies of the World as a Stage
There is another sort of brain damage that arises from a fixation on
the obvious deceptions in the 9/11 incidents. Sixteen years and
three presidential administrations later, some people - myself
included - are showing signs of fatigue over every single criminal
incident on the police blotter being called a false flag event. Dog
catcher down the street? It must be Homeland Security about to
perpetrate canine attacks on your neighborhood children. Get over
this mania, it's worn out, tired and driving you insane. There
happen to be actual crimes and terrorist actions being committed for
various reasons, which law enforcement agencies may sometimes fumble
due to inertia, bureaucratic red tape or simply because they were
taken by surprise. Many types of criminal plots are nipped in the
bud and therefore go unreported but some of the more calculated
plans are bound to evade detection due to the law of statistics and
probability.
Despite the fact that official coverup is the standard response to
terror-related crimes, many, many eyewitness accounts from the Route
91 Harvest Festival have presented sufficient, credible evidence to
blow the coverup away. Additionally, we have a solid timeline
of events, recorded police radio traffic, conflicts among law
enforcement agencies and recent background to indicate a calculated
terrorist event aimed at putting political pressure on the Executive
Office, State Department and Pentagon. Furthermore, it seems
more than clear that the assault teams could easily have killed
hundreds, if not thousands more people). Journalists are not bound
by the same rules as lawmen and are expected to conduct independent
investigations with professional competence. If someone cannot
keep up with the process of investigative journalism, then please go
back to watching the mindless plots of cable television and deluge
of endless commercials. The Vegas massacre is complicated by the
very fact of where it occurred and by the political effects it
generates on the Middle East power balance as the wars in Syria and
Iraq wind down.
The denials of gunshot killings have outraged many people who were
caught in the crossfire and whose loved ones and friends are no
longer with us. Given the tragedy for the survivors and families of
the dead, it is grotesque to deny what happened, especially when the
perpetrators have already announced that the next strike is going to
be against San Francisco.
It is therefore not just insensitive to cast doubts on the pain of
the victims, but nay-saying is stupid from a public security
standpoint. Denial is helping the terrorists to escape and as
such the deniers are essentially taking the side of terrorism.
If that's the way it 's going to be, don't expect anyone to risk
their lives to rescue an armchair theorist.
Graphic Violence in Media Imagery
In the Vietnam War, photojournalists sent home gut-wrenching images
of the brutality of war, scenes like shot-to-pieces wounded US
soldiers on stretchers, blown-apart bodies in the mud, the execution
with gunshot to the head of an insurgent during the Tet Offensive,
and a napalm-burnt girl running naked down a road in fear and pain.
Today, those sorts of graphic images cannot be published...not only
due to the risk of lawsuits by the victims or surviving families who
object to sensationalist displays of gore and pain that increase the
newsstand sales of the mass media, but also because of concerns for
media ethics in regard to commercial profiteering from bloodshed.
The ethical debate over gory images and compromising photos of
prisoners that aid the hostage-takers, came to a head in another war
situation, the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. Following the famous
Blackhawk Down gun battle, the naked bodies of American Special
Forces soldiers were dragged through the unpaved streets to the
cheers and jeers of overjoyed urban mobs who kicked the corpses and
threw garbage on them. Here, again, was a most shocking example of
war pornography, guaranteed to be inspirational to would-be "freedom
fighters" or "terrorists" however you want to define that sort of
killer-in-waiting.
Photos of abused and defiled American dead were published by some
so-called news magazines with male genitals exposed to the viewer
and to the absolute horror of the families of those soldiers. This
sort of frank depiction in publications show clearly that the
outcome of Operation Gothic Serpent was anything but a false flag
attack and that death in war is agonizingly real. But was the public
display of abused corpses fair to the children, wives and mothers of
those fallen soldiers? That goes to the core of 'media
ethics'.
Commercial Exploitation of Victims of Violence
Mogadishu ended the debate over ethics until the issue resurfaced
with the papparazzi photos of a shaken, bruised and blood-stained
Princess Diana dying in the Paris Tunnel. From that point
onward, the media worldwide (even the exploitative press like the
National Enquirer) accepted self-imposed limits on graphic gore and
sexualized violence. The media ethics controversy resurfaced in Hong
Kong in the year 2000, when the tabloid press published upskirt
photos of a suicidal woman, threatening to jump off a ledge.
She jumped and the parasitic media leaped on the chance to follow up
with photos of her smashed, bloody exposed body. Despite
record newspaper and magazine sales, there was a backlash from
journalism schools and the Christian Church against
commercialization of violence and obscenity, during which I had no
ethical qualms about arguing in favor of privacy and regard for
family sensitivities, as well as the need to prevent copy-cat
crimes.
In this time of mourning for the Las Vegas dead and seriously
wounded, when the black threat of terrorism hangs over the country
following the indiscriminate slaughter at the Orlando 'Pulse' and
now the Route 91 Festival, discretion is advised. Social propriety
does put a limit on the scope of the investigative journalism and
critique of law enforcement, but that is a social reality that
journalists need to abide by while tracking down the perpetrators
and their rationale. In this hunt for the truth, sniping from the
false flag wavers is an aid to the official cover-up that could help
the criminally responsible get away to do it again.
Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor with the Japan Times newspapers in
Tokyo and has reported on the Afghan War and the guerrilla campaign in
Kashmir, attended the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and
was a founding lecturer at new journalism schools in Hong Kong and Beijing.
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