Tiger Woods’ Penis > Murder

I was really looking forward to the mainstream news last weekend. That says something considering that anytime I hear CNN anchor Rick Sanchez my eardrums withdraw inward for protection. WikiLeaks, the relatively unknown Internet renegades, released decrypted footage from a US Apache helicopter from 2007.

In the video, a group of civilians, including Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, are killed after being assumed insurgents in an Eastern Baghdad public square. The footage is brutal, a tragedy as innocents are gunned down from the sky. After Noor-Eldeen’s group is killed, a van of civilians with children inside pulls up to save survivors. They are also promptly taken out. I’ve played a thousand hours of “realistic” war first-person shooters, and I wasn’t a bit desensitized as I heard the gunner watch Noor-Eldeen crawl from the wreckage and say toward him, “C’mon buddy...all you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”

No one can claim WikiLeaks is entirely neutral; the leaked video was titled “Collateral Murder.” One can’t use this footage to base all of our foreign wars, but it does raise questions about proper engagement procedure for troops.

I don’t expect things to change in that regard. Our military forces are always going to put the safety of our troops over “maybes” and caution, regardless of a few innocent casualties.

I’m actually more disappointed in our media coverage of the footage. The video has more than 5 million views and was advertised in press releases for a few weeks. I know the Internet influences mainstream news. It’s not uncommon to see a particularly interesting obscure article show up on sites such as Digg or Reddit before being Headline News a few days later. So why is something that’s both a  military cover-up of civilian deaths, an inside look into the Iraq war and all the brutal violence today’s younglings crave sitting on the sidelines while we cover Tiger Woods’ return to golf? If the van had been filled with strippers and not children, would that story be greeting me when I turn on the news (attempt at making a point aside, a group of strippers in the middle of a war zone would make the national news based on absurdity, not just because of our collective sex drive).

WikiLeaks pulled a miracle of information release, Reuters had been trying to obtain the footage via the Freedom of Information Act since the attack, but it might be time to give up on working with old media and just realize there’s an information divide that won’t cross over to the small screen like a viral link will.


E-mail: cquandt@indiana.edu