All’s fair in love and war.
And journalism.
Last week, the fusspots of the Los Angeles Times published macabre photographs of U.S. soldiers striking victory poses with the remains of Afghan insurgents.
They struck gold, of course, with the tendentious front-page story, which “prompted thousands of online comments, and hundreds of phone calls, e-mails and letters to the editor,” a Times blog proclaimed.
The two published photographs – depictions of paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne bemusedly toying with the corpses like life-sized G.I. Joes – were among the 18 the Times had obtained from a soldier desiring “to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline.”
Predictably, the “scandal” is the liberal media’s present news gem, the jewel most recently set in the Fourth Estate’s antimilitarist crown.
Indeed, the story is recent. The 2010 photographs, however, are anything but. No news is good news, proverbially, but not for the ravenous American media.
And certainly not for the penny-pinching, cash-strapped Times, which in March instituted a New York Times-esque paywall, charging readers for access to the newspaper’s online content.
Of course, doing so necessitates publishing strong, compelling content to generate paid subscriptions, and the aforementioned photographs – even if old news – are most assuredly that.
There’s a word for the media’s bloated coverage of the photographs: sensationalism.
First and foremost, the “insurgents” were suicide bombers, which ought to deaden one’s initial idealistic outrage. The U.S. soldiers had not themselves dispatched the insurgents – not a shot was fired, by all accounts. In fact, the corpses in one photograph were those of “three insurgents who … had accidentally blown themselves up,” according to the article.
Americans’ indignation at the photographs is perplexing, given that the only disgruntled Afghan seems to be President Hamid Karzai. Suicide is forbidden in the Quran, and Islamic burial rites are customarily denied to suicide bombers.
In fact, a Wall Street Journal editorial reported Sunday that a bombers’ remains were once “left in tree branches as a deterrent to others” – a gruesome reminder of the prevalence of such attacks in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Afghan National Police “hate suicide bombers as no one else does,” related the editorial’s author, having once been embedded with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Curiously, Afghan National Police officers were among those saying “Cheese!” in one of the photographs – which disarms the notion that this is a breakdown in American leadership and American discipline.
Rather, this is masculinity at its most masculine, and boys will be boys – always.
Indeed, one might just as easily envision an 18-year-old Tom Sawyer – all grown up and enlisted, no less mischievous – partaking of such devilry with the very same shit-eating American grin. Private Sawyer, of course, would be no less culpable for it.
But the fact of the matter is the depicted soldiers’ conduct – otherwise unbecoming of civilians – is precisely that which is required of warriors: callousness, detachment, frigidity. It’s the psychological full metal jacket, as it were, that enables them to be soldiers: to take life and to give their own.
That is the soldier’s leadership and discipline, ultimately – and within the U.S. military, the published photographs indicate no such breakdown therein.
Indeed, all is fair in love and war.
And sensationalist journalism.
Phil Sweeney is a 25-year-old English senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_PhilSweeney.
 
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Contact Phil Sweeney at [email protected]