Down a Slippery Slope: The Dangers of Censorship in America

The 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have been saturated by war; from the paperboy, shouting from the streets corners of cities across the country during the First World War, selling his stories of death and heartache from across an ocean, to live satellite images of battlefields in Iraq, and Afghanistan. In the hundred years since the invention of the radio, war has become an unavoidable aspect of American life. How is public perception of this constant war shaped? How do we discern truth, from falsehood? We have come to rely totally on journalism and the media to keep us informed of the violent goings on in the world. People have come to trust in the images they see and the reports they read. How trustworthy are these sources of information? How readily should we believe them? Through what filters has the information we receive already been passed? The sad truth is that governments and ruling powers having been censoring wars, and reports of wars since before the printing press. In the 20th century however it has become an art. Public relations spin-doctors spend lucrative careers on the payroll of the taxpayer; trying to convince the public to swallow whatever bitter medicine they have been hired to hock. However, it is not only the government and it’s agents who censor our perceptions of war. Other guilty culprits include, former statesmen, writers, religious leaders and sadly, even historians and educators. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, author James Loewen exposes many of the fallacies presented to students of history by textbooks and those who write them. He writes about the after-the-fact censorship with which the Vietnam War is often treated. He writes, “[In Vietnam] we evaluated our progress by body counts and drew free-fire zones in which the entire civilian population was treated as the enemy…any photograph of an American soldier setting fire to a Vietnamese house…would have gotten the point across, but no textbook shows such an act.”(250) Loewen makes the point, in the same chapter, that it has become unpatriotic to portray the American Government or its agencies in a negative light. This has become even truer after the events of September 11th, 2001 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the last six to seven years, it has become cultural blasphemy to speak ill of the military or its members; they have been canonized in society to be an untouchable symbol of virtue and honor, attaining an almost saint like status. To insult the military and by proxy, the government that directs them, has become taboo.
As a result, the public accountability that was built into the Constitution via the First Amendment falls by the wayside. Journalist Laura Rozen writing in her article “Hung Out To dry.” laments this decline in accountability. She writes, “Perhaps nothing is more demoralizing, though, than the sense that journalism’s most groundbreaking investigations did not yield the kind of…reform that past eras have seen—that the system of democratic checks and balances, of which the press is only one part, is broken.”(34) Censorship, whether by the federal government or popular societal trends, disrupts the public ability to perceive the actions of their government (of which they and all citizens in a democracy are equal shareholders) in a realistic light. As Loewen says “Censorship is the cause, not the remedy, of confusion about war.”(250) Contrary to the beliefs of General Westmoreland, the increase in censorship, and the publics’ willingness to allow it since the Vietnam war, has lead to the American people’s mute acceptance of the same shameful acts and atrocities that brought people out by the millions to protest only 40 years ago. It is evident that both social, and governmental censorship inevitably skews the national perceptions, and their willingness to dissent against it.
Sad as it may sound, the Vietnam War was an incredible period in journalism. Journalists in Vietnam had almost complete freedom to report what they experienced to the world. Ward Just, a contributor to the book Reporting Vietnam, a collection of reports both from writers in the field and at stateside relates what this period was like, he writes “There was much that was traditional about the war, including the reporting of it. Vietnam was the last war in which American military authorities willingly transported reporters into battle. When you arrived at the command post you were briefed, pointed in the direction of the gunfire, and then left alone to do your work.”(Just, XV) This freedom for journalists to report where, and what they would, led to some of the most gruesome and incredible images in American history, A naked girl running down the street fleeing a napalm attack, the execution of a Vietcong militant by a police chief on the streets of Saigon, or bodies, littering a road after the My Lai massacre. (Loewen, 246) Americans responded to these images with overwhelming passion, leading to the greatest anti-war protests in American history. Richard Lacayo, writing for Time magazine captures in words, the effect these photos and others had on the American public; he says, “Vietnam…was the media's war. Television broadcasts and searing photographs of the wounded and the dead helped turn public opinion against the conflict.”(Lacayo) The Vietnam War is an example of the power of the press, free from censorship. The images and stories filtering into people’s televisions and radios across the nation were brutal, graphic and undeniable. For the first time since the civil war, the American people came faced to face with war, not by reading in the newspaper about a far off battlefield, but with their own eyes. These powerful, disturbing images touched the soul of the nation, forging their perception of the conflict in iron. It was difficult to debate the efficacy and necessity of the war when full color images of death and slaughter filled peoples homes every night.
Of all the images of the Vietnam War, one of the most violent, and disturbing is that of the aftermath of the massacre at My Lai. In March of 1968 an American infantry company marched into a Vietnamese village in search of the North Vietnamese. They did not find them but attacked the village anyway, by the end of the engagement 504 innocent men, women and children had been killed by the soldiers (“In The Name of War”) The story of the massacre did not break until a year later. Afterwards an inquest was held by the military and in the end only one soldier, Lt. William Calley was found guilty. According to the BBC “He was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. Within three days he was out of prison, pending appeal, on the personal instructions of President Richard Nixon… Later that year he was paroled after completing one third of his sentence.”(“In The Name of War”) What is possibly more alarming than the gruesome brutality of the massacre, is that the Army attempted to cover it up, and they were successful for nearly a year. In this light, it is easy to see how public perception is determined, not necessarily by reality, but the parts of it we are allowed to see. Furthermore, in the case of Lt. Calley, it shows that the justice and equal rights [and responsibilities] under law that America was founded on, are able to be bent and warped by the government when it’s own agents are involved.
In the 21st century, the un-altered brutality of war is lost on many Americans. In 2003, when the American led invasion of Iraq began, America saw something new in the history of wartime journalism. For the invasion, the Bush government invented the concept of the embedded reporter. Embedded reporters are assigned to military units, and they are limited by the military in regards to what they can report. This has provided reporters with unprecedented access to military operations and information regarding the war, but at what cost? Reporter Terry Gainey writes, “Reporters who covered the Vietnam War had much greater access to the stark reality of combat and encountered fewer obstacles from the military than their counterparts in Iraq.”(Gainey, 16) There is little question that the American people perceive the war in Iraq much differently than Vietnam. With a few small exceptions, the American people have not taken to the streets in same numbers they did during Vietnam. Even though by 2006 a majority of Americans were against the war. The biggest difference between the wars is the access that the American people have to them. During the invasion of Iraq, viewers tuned in to see embedded reporters riding on the backs of tanks through open desert, and triumphantly through Iraqi villages. However, with numerous reporters, embedded with numerous military units, there are very few images that stick in the conscious mind. If a person were to think about the invasion they might call up the image of the bombing of Baghdad in the run up to the invasion, or the statue of Saddam Hussein toppling in the town center, but the most demanding images of the war came much later, from Abu Ghraib prison.
In 2004, photographs of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib found their way into the hands of the media. One of these pictures showed grinning soldiers next to a pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees, one prisoner was leashed like a dog. (“Blame for Abu Ghraib”) Many of these photographs are more degrading than this example. The truly alarming thing is, that much like the My Lai massacre, evidence of these crimes did not come to light until almost a year after they began. In response to the nation’s reaction to the Abu Ghraib photographs, the U.S. Department of Defense, under secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was quick to shift blame away from itself. It blamed instead the young soldiers seen in the photographs and insisted that it did not issue orders encouraging such treatment. However, in 2008, a report by the Senate Armed Services committee stated, according to USA Today, “the guards' tactics were the byproduct of policies spawned by a 2002 memo, signed by President Bush, declaring that the Geneva Conventions for humane treatment of detainees did not apply to enemy fighters in the war on terror.”(“Blame for Abu Ghraib”) After directly denying any responsibility for the Abu Ghraib Scandal, the Senate Armed Services Committee found Donald Rumsfeld and top Bush administration officials guilty of lying outright to the American people. There seems to be an attitude in government and higher levels of power that people are unable or unwilling to accept the truth about their own government and it’s actions. Examples like these demonstrate even more the importance of public awareness. Citizens rely on governments to protect them from those who would harm them, but what if the government is causing the harm? Is it possible that the U.S. federal government is causing harm to its people? Loewen shows how social censoring in textbooks trains people not to think that way. He writes, “textbook authors portray a heroic state, and, like their other heroes this one is pretty much without blemishes. Such an approach converts textbooks into anti-citizenship manuals---handbooks for acquiescence.”(220) Censorship, and the exoneration of power is a recurring cycle. Controlling what, and how people learn about the government, makes official censorship more palatable to the point that it almost goes unnoticed. At what point do those in power become subject to public accountability?
In 2005, a news story broke that claimed the Bush administration had authorized warrantless wire-tapping of American citizens, and that it was working in conjunction with the CIA to operate detention facilities overseas where prisoners of the war on terror were held indefinitely without trial, and in many cases, tortured. This caused more public outcry than almost anything else during the war, and yet did not result in the kind of public accountability that has been seen, even in the recent past. Journalist Laura Rozen laments the lack of public outcry following these revelations, she writes “both stories prompted expressions of concern about the policies from some members of Congress, giving rise to the expectation that, as in the past, the revelations of controversial and possibly illegal government programs would lead to congressional investigations and a public accounting. But that didn’t happen.”(33) Social censorship of the type described by Loewen is a possible cause for this. When people have been taught from a young age to revere the government as a hero, as a force for good beyond reproach, it can be difficult to know how to react when it falls short of expectation. In this confusion, this uncertainty of what it means to be a citizen in a democratic nation, people forget that the government’s main responsibility is to its people. The first amendment to the bill of rights, the cornerstone of our constitution, guarantees the right of the governed to keep accountable those who are put in power. America seems at times to be a child who is unwilling to accept that its parent’s are fallible and can make mistakes. People fear to challenge the government, for it means challenging the very image of America, formed in their childhood. An “America”, that is warped and censored almost beyond true recognition, not by the government, but by historians, and teachers. The fear of challenging the perception of “America” increased exponentially after September 11th 2001. Laura Rozen, quoting journalist Seymour Hersh, writes “In the climate that prevailed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ‘newspapers decided they were on the team. And that set off a chain, an attitude, that chilled the First Amendment right away.’” (35) After 9/11, the concept of “America” as an idea, ceased be an abstract and became a tangible cultural phenomenon. As a wave of nationalism swept over the country following the terrorist attacks, it became “un-patriotic” in the public eye to question the government or it’s motives. This lock-down on “un-american” sentiment extended to the media as well and it became less and less willing to publish stories critical of the government.
It seems strange that this social censorship is still so prevalent in American society. After all, hasn’t the government given its citizens ample reason to mistrust? Loewen writes, “From the Vietnam War to Watergate…to the mythical weapons of mass destruction that allegedly caused George W. Bush to invade Iraq, revelation after revelation of misconduct and deceit…shattered the trust of the American people.”(Loewen, 242) With these examples, and many others it seems reasonable that trust in the government is not a universal surety. So, why when it is so easy to mistrust, and be cynical of our government, is censorship and misinformation so pervasive in American society? Why aren’t their more dissenters? It seems that traditionalism plays a large part in this; traditionalism that, while based on the past has little basis in history. This traditionalism for some reason rests in the cradle of the textbook historian. Where this traditionalist censorship is allowed to flourish, a free, self-governing democracy will always struggle to flourish. It in fact encourages the government censorship that allows travesties such as Abu Ghraib and the My Lai massacre to go unanswered for. When it becomes taboo for people to question their government, it becomes taboo for them to question its censorship, and those who report it. As Laura Rozen writes in “Hung Out To Dry”, “Concern about government scrutiny of [journalists] and their contacts, partisan attacks on their ethics and patriotism, and hours huddled with lawyers have taken a toll on reporters.”(34) With the people of America at large, unwilling or unable to question the motives of its government, it is crucial that those who are willing, be they activists or journalists, even politicians, be allowed to do so without unnecessary reproach. Without dissenters, without people who cut through the lies and misinformation, democracy is not possible. Often these people are branded as “un-American” or “un-patriotic”, but are in fact standing for what is at the heart of our democracy, the right of the people to keep the government accountable.
There are many ways that our American democracy, which has stood for over 200 hundred years, can come under attack. That attack may come in the form of terrorism, or international aggression, but the most insidious form of attack can come from the government, which is sworn to uphold it. Agencies designed to protect America’s citizens, like the National Security Agency, or the Department of Homeland Security, can turn inward to suppress and monitor the very people they once protected. Loewen writes, “In the last fifty years, the power of the CIA, the National Security Council, and other covert agencies has grown to become, in some eyes, a fearsome fourth branch of the government.” (243) The people of America have the power to curtail this fourth branch, with their words, their actions and their votes. Before this can happen however, America must realize that misinformation is everywhere, including their history textbooks. They must cut through the lies being sold by those in power and find out what is true for themselves. Americans must be wary of those who would deny them access to information, for leaders who do so, send us down a slippery slope from democracy, to despotism.