I doubt that such coverage "isn't permitted". I believe the news media has found that too detailed coverage of war drives away viewers. To keep viewers, the news needs to maintain a buffer of detachment.

Data point: born in '79. My first distinct memory of seeing war footage was during the Gulf War (which I guess is kind of recognized as being the first "cable-news" war). I know I stayed up way late watching CNN for coverage on that, but the Rodney King riots left a *much* larger impression on me the following year. I don't know if that's just because it was closer to home or because some of the footage may have been more violent or because it was civilian-footage (probably all three), but I was glued to the television set for those.

Should stuff like that be shown? Absolutely, in my opinion. But I think the line has greyed a little bit with the advent of on-demand coverage. Part of me thinks that of course this stuff should be shoved down people's throats and "look what is going on in the world, fuckers". But my more rational side says that it's pretty easy to find for those that want/need to see it, and that's probably okay. The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, but more towards the "seeker" vs. "shover" side.

It should absolutely be shown, yes. Many times people support war because they think it's clean and tidy like a video game or a movie. If you support a war, you shouldn't be able to avoid seeing what that war actually looks like.

I doubt that such coverage "isn't permitted"

Lots of it isn't. Our last Administration were geniuses at stage-managing and imagery. Even now there are limitations on images like the dead soldiers' coffins being unloaded at Dover AFB, though at least those have been loosened a little bit. In Iraq journalists are still often confined to the Green Zone, where things are hunky-dory because it's a gated community. Etc.

Bad wording on my part. I meant "if the media can get hold of it, they could decide to show it".

Speaking of which, have things in general changed much since Obama?

Yes.

I remember the Vietnam war on TV every night. I find it so odd that with two big American lead wars on it is very possible to kind of forget that war is happening unless you go out to look for it. Also, the coverage of events in the Middle east and other hot spots has dwindled over the past 30 years. You need to really search that out too.

As the old guard press has fallen more in step with government management and embedded journalists I think they have been helping make themselves less relevant. Bloggers, and non traditional media have opened up many new paths for information and many younger folks have completely abandoned old media.

New media offers a lot of good things but I worry that they may not have the kind of resources to dig into some stories and I worry that with countries like England and Australia looking to add more control to what people can access on the Internet that we may end up losing access to things like Wikileaks. At that point we have a lap dog media and no real alternate sources of info. That worries me a lot.

Yeah, I remember the body counts during the evening news. Always footage.

I saw the Vietnam war on the tv news, too. It should definitely be shown. I was so angry during the early Gulf war when they showed footage of the 'surgical strikes' that were like a video game. Too many people were all 'yay' about that - they weren't shown bloody civilians.

She doesn't remember when hippies were angry and there were riots and violence. And that's my first TV stuff.

Century City in LA. . I was there. There was escatlating outrage, and escalating street action back then. Not that it really helped to end the war but it felt good, in a way. Which made the publc reaction to the escalating outrages of the Bush administration (surely this, etc. etc.) very confusing to me. I mean lets go out and turn over some cop cars, at least.

First grown-up TV memory: sitting on my mother's lap and watching Nixon resign. I said to my mother: "I thought he said he wasn't a quitter." Yet another early lesson that adults were/are idiots.

"I thought he said he wasn't a quitter."

He said he wasn't a crook. Wrong on that score also.

The means of perception management were a lot different 60 years ago. First of all, the military draft was active during the Viet Nam war, which means that lots of people in the military (and their families) didn't pre-buy the war. The politics of the military is very different now because there isn't wide participation in military adventures. Back then was more levee en masse and now it's more mercenary. Which means there was a HUGE difference in the public political engagement with war - it was more personal and less moralistic one-upsmanship.

This bled over into the media as well. A big difference between then and now is the massive concentration of media ownership in just a few hands. Back then, most major cities had two or even three newspapers. So there would frequently be hawk and dove papers who competed for readership on the basis of political orientation. That has disappeared entirely. Now its just one big homogenous herd of take-the-handout drones. With a few major exceptions such and Moon's Washington Post and Murdoch's fascist media empire. So the mass media has become deadeningly monolithic and pretty much the handmaiden of power. Not that it was ever standing up for the underdog, you see, but at least there wasn't this vast tapioca pudding of regurgitated PR and propaganda toadying.

And ever since the chickenhawks started the post-Viet Nam cycle of manage wars, the media has been heavily censored. Not in the editorial sense, but by the pool coverage where they are just trotted around on a leash by their military handlers. It started with Grenada and has gotten worse and worse every step of the way. It's not that stories get spiked (though that happens, too) but there is never anybody there to cover the crap when it hits the fan. Instead, after all the nasty bits have been tidied away, the tame poodle get their guided tour and are fed the carefully chosen scraps.

The intertubes are no fix for this. On-demand is totally different from mass audience. In many ways, the shift to on-demand has killed dialog and allowed people to live in their own disengaged fantasy worlds - ala the Fox universe vs Jon Stewart.

I was around during the rioting in the 60's. And what never gets reported about that time (unless you go back and read some of the commission reports) is that most of the riots were started by provocateurs - race riots were usually preceded by white vigilantes making organized attacks on black communities (often with the connivance of law enforcement) and many of the anti-war riots were orchestrated by the cops.

If the underclass gathered in numbers, they were going to get attacked. More or less exactly the same as we saw about ten years ago with the cycle of disorders following the WTO (and yes, the Spirit of Seattle was pretty much a police riot fueled by tensions between the extremely corrupt rank and file and Stamper's attempts to clean up the department.) Which is to say that in Seattle at least, very little had changed since the 60's and Ray Carrol and the Tac Squad were also the major bagmen for the local mob (compare William Chambliss, On The Take to Black Flag Over Seattle [WTO])

Nothing really changes, it just gets steadily worse.

First grown-up TV memory: sitting on my mother's lap and watching Nixon resign.

My husband was born during the Senate committee hearings. My FIL likes to talk about how pissed off my MIL was that she had to go to the hospital and miss out on watching Nixon get his. heh.

warbaby, that is an excellent point about the draft.

warbaby, great comment. . .I would add that, at my college, the most radical guy, the guy who tried to incite the most stuff, turned out to be an FBI undercover agent.