# YouTube War/The Uncovered Body: What Makes Insurgent Videos "Propaganda"

​ The Uncovered Body: What Makes Insurgent Videos "Propaganda?"
The press coverage of the fighting in Iraq has included periodic stories about insurgent use of web-based propaganda. Distinct from news stories about terrorist use of the web as a general phenomenon in ​other words, reporters have sometimes done stories about specific items posted to the Internet by terrorist or insurgent groups. These have generally been stories about what an individual video segment tells us about the terrorists. They tend to be stories about video segments so graphic the footage cannot be shown in their entirety on American television networks. But what makes these segments so graphic, what in fact defines graphic for American television, is that a body is shown. And almost inevitably these segments that are not shown, but which are discussed as news, are explicitly labeled as terrorist or insurgent propaganda.
What none of these news pieces seems to mention, in fact what they quite coyly ignore (whether on television or in print), is that these video segments generally get explicitly labeled as propaganda only when a body is visible—making the footage unusable by television. When one of these segments was released which seemed to show the body of an American pilot, for example, the release of the segment was treated by NBC as in and of itself newsworthy.
BRIAN WILLIAMS, anchor:
Now to another story making news tonight, growing outrage this evening over a blurry video that appears to be the latest tool in the Iraq insurgents' propaganda war against the United States. The video purports to show the burning body of an American pilot. More now from NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski.
Jim, what is the thinking on this piece of videotape?
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI reporting:
Well, Brian, one military official in Iraq says he's outraged by this video, while Pentagon officials admit the video does appear to be authentic.
​The video, complete with music soundtrack, is poor quality but appears to show the burning wreckage of a US Apache helicopter.
Unidentified Man: (From videotape) (Foreign language spoken)
MIKLASZEWSKI: Shouting 'Allah Akbar,' 'Allah is the greatest,' enemy fighters are also shown dragging the body of at least one man across the ground. Military officials tell NBC News only partial remains of the two Apache pilots have been recovered from the crash site. The helicopter was shot down while on combat patrol Saturday just southwest of Baghdad. The video was posted on the Internet today by a militant Islamic group, the Mujahadeen Shura Council, with ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq and its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi has often released videos of his attacks against Americans as a propaganda tool to rally supporters and to raise money for his terrorist operations in Iraq.
But there is something left out of that report about the way NBC—and, in fairness, all the other networks—generally treats all those other videos.
There is a distinction between how segments are treated by the networks when bodies are visible and when they are not, which turns on the standards American networks have in place for treating images of the human body in extremis. This distinction was drawn particularly clearly when a Bulgarian commercial helicopter was shot down (with American contractors on board) in 2005. Two videos were released to the press by insurgents claiming responsibility. The first was particularly brutal. The single survivor of the crash was approached and told to run—which he is only able to do with assistance getting up—at which point, on film, they murder him (he's shot). This video is treated as in and of itself newsworthy, but although some ​networks air a few seconds of footage from the video (while others air still images or no images at all), no network airs the chilling ending. Some of the networks using footage from the video were quite creative in finding ways to avoid actually airing the graphic murder, while still being true to their point: the horror of the man's death, and the perhaps greater horror that it was treated as grist for the propaganda mill, for example, blacking out the visuals while continuing the audio track so the single shot is clearly heard by the audience. For each network, the point of the news story is the same: that the existence of this footage tells us something about the nature of the enemy we are dealing with. The footage may be newsworthy, but it is not itself news footage, and in several cases, the choice not to air the final images is discussed explicitly. Interestingly, in one case, the decision is explained by comparing the networks' standards to those of the Arab station al Jazeera. CBS's Lee Cowan states this "particular video was so outrageous even the Arabic channel al Jazeera refused to show the shooting itself."
The second tape released was claimed to be of the shooting down of the helicopter. Interestingly, each network presents this as a case of "he said, he said." Here we have two tapes, two claims, and no way to adjudicate the dispute, and so we present you with both. But in point of fact, by the time the network stories were aired, the security company that owned the helicopter had already identified the man killed in the first tape as one of their personnel, which would seem to clearly settle the matter. Thus while it is of interest that different groups are attempting to get credit for the same attack, each of these stories presenting the two claims as of equal weight—and using that as the basis justifying the decision to air the ​second video—are simply wrong. There would seem to be no basis for the second group's claim, and therefore no reason to air this second video, even if it is worth mentioning its existence.
But what makes the second video of interest here is the difference in the way the networks treated it, compared to the first. Because it was visually of the destruction only of a machine, it was not treated as graphic at all, and was aired with little comment by the networks, despite the fact that if authentic, it would have been video of the deaths of quite a few more men than the first tape. (The helicopter, after all, carried 11 people total.) After the second video was released, CBS's reporter made the distinction explicit:
A group called Jaish al-Mujahideen says that they were the ones that shot down a commercial chopper yesterday, killing six Americans and five others. To prove it, their video shows the helicopter being shot out of the sky. As disturbing as this video is, it pales in comparison to what a different militant group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, claims to have done after the chopper crashed. A shaky camera stumbles on what appears to be the Bulgarian pilot, the lone survivor of the attack, lying in the grass.
By the same token, when footage is used that shows the death of American troops but the audiences' view of those troops is shielded by the vehicles they are riding in, the footage is apparently uncontroversial, judging from the lack of negative reaction to the practice; it has become the norm, and as such it is unquestioned. The footage is acceptable, in other words, because although the bodies are present, they are not visible. Yet when one network aired footage showing the death of American troops out in the open—even though they clearly identified the footage as enemy propaganda and even though the penultimate scenes, just before ​the soldiers killed by enemy snipers slumped forward, were blacked out—it was the cause of considerable controversy.
The first thing that made that story problematic was that, while the footage was, to be sure, repeatedly identified as propaganda, the story was not contextualized as a story about enemy propaganda practices, as had been the case with prior stories involving footage showing American deaths out in the open. Instead, the fact that this was propaganda material was acknowledged and then set aside and the story was then contextualized as a substantive story about enemy tactics: what did the footage tell us about the enemy practice of killing American soldiers by using sniper teams? In other words, this may have been propaganda, but it was treated as conveying legitimate, trustworthy information that was worth evaluating on the merits all the same.
Certainly most news stories that label the segments as propaganda never mention that the websites where these segments are generally found are also a regular source for the news networks—that would mean admitting that material they are themselves explicitly labeling as enemy propaganda in one context is also being used by them in another context as a source for material on a regular basis, and very often without any particular identification that tells the viewer what the original source was. Thus it is general practice for footage to be identified explicitly as propaganda when men are killed outside their vehicles, but to never be identified that way when they are killed while inside their vehicles, as even when footage is sourced to the enemy, it is not explicitly labeled as propaganda. (The CNN story is only barely an exception, since despite the fact that the material is identified explicitly as ​propaganda, that quickly becomes relatively incidental to the story.)
Thus when the body or bodies are shielded from view by a vehicle and the footage is therefore not treated by the broadcast press as propaganda, it instead becomes available to be treated as news footage. It then can be seamlessly integrated into the regular coverage of the war, not to illustrate a point about the terrorists as in feature stories, but to illustrate the attacks on convoys, to illustrate the daily round of events, just as if it had been provided by AP or Reuters or indeed the networks' own cameramen. It is the way CNN diverges from this practice that made their piece so controversial—their footage was of soldiers being killed out in the open, but their story was not about the footage's power or the fact it was being used as propaganda but about its substantive value, its value as information, presumably the exact opposite of propaganda. It should be noted that CNN did not acquire these particular images by downloading them from the Internet, but rather the images were sent to CNN by the group in question, which is what made them exclusive. That only added to the controversy, however. Clearly, in showing the material, CNN was doing exactly what this group wanted them to do. You do not send material to CNN as a general practice because you want them to keep it private. While material is also posted to the Internet because a group wants to share it with a larger audience, the circumstances of the case seemed to highlight the choice made by all the networks on a regular basis, to give the enemy far greater access to an American audience than they could ever hope to acquire without the media's assistance. Indeed, in this case CNN was up front about that fact and even claimed the group had larger ambitions for their message. The show's anchor, Anderson Cooper, said ​the "insurgents [were] delivering a deadly message, aiming for a global audience," and seconds later, apparently with no sense of irony, welcomed "our viewers watching on CNN International."
Sometimes the segments are shown with visual and aural cues that they were taken from a terrorist or insurgent site, although rarely sufficient ones, given that no effort has ever been taken to explicitly address the fact that this is a normal journalistic practice. (It is certainly true that periodic stories refer to claims being made by these groups on their websites, so that the audience might be casually aware that reporters and networks regularly monitor such sites, but that is a far cry from discussing the practice of using these sites as a source of visual product.) Sometimes there are no cues at all, but the fact is that these segments are downloaded and used in this fashion by all six networks on a fairly regular basis.
CNN, CBS, and most recently NBC on rare occasions have imposed a graphic—called a chyron—that states INSURGENT VIDEO on at least some of the material, a parallel to the practice all networks use when showing material received from the Department of Defense (DoD), when networks use a graphic saying something along the line of DOD FILE FOOTAGE. This seems to be not just a perfectly acceptable solution, but in fact a quite elegant one, so long as it is applied consistently—meaning whenever terrorist or insurgent websites are the source of the footage—and throughout the length of the footage, which does not so far seem to be the case for some reason for any of the three networks. In fact, doing this inconsistently might be worse than never doing it at all, since viewers might believe that any time the graphic is missing, the footage must by definition not come from insurgent sources.
​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/52 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/53 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/54 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/55 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/56 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/57 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/58 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/59 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/60 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/61 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/62 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/63 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/64 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/65 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/66 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/67 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/68 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/69 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/70 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/71 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/72 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/73 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/74 ​Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/75 ​of the video on their nightly news show. NBC's reporter said, "The Website contained videos showing two mutilated corpses. NBC News will not show it because of its gruesome nature." They, too, only reported the video one time during their morning news show. There is no indication ABC covered the story at all. So the fact that these soldiers had not only been tortured and killed, but that their deaths had been turned into a propaganda tool, could easily have been missed entirely by the American public. It would be easy, given the amount of coverage, for someone who followed the news even fairly carefully to believe that they were missing still, and hence to be unaware of what the enemy had done to these two men.
Is it possible the public reaction would have been a widespread revulsion, and a determination that the military should be pulled out immediately, rather than be exposed to such dangers? Yes, but it seems more likely that a rhetorical appeal based on the theme that "no one does this to our boys" would have been successful.
* ↑ See for example, "Behind Enemy Lines: Inside the Insurgency," ABC News: Nightline, February 14, 2006, available from Lexis-Nexis Academic, web.lexis-nexis.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/universe/document?_m=15e7e48b7027fb21ccd3fe52bf464b48&_docnum=9&wchp=dGLbVzb-zSkVA&_md5=b7530bbb317816b48fdc453cb32cf5b2; Glaser and Coll.
* ↑ "Insurgent Video Shows Burning Body of American Pilot," NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams, April 5, 2006, available from Lexis-Nexis Academic, web.lexis-nexis.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/universe/document?_m=b64947e1c416ff6c0492b7c1afa67c72&_docnum=3&wchp=dGLbVzb-zSkVA&_md5=0d79dd40bd6139016cd7a797f384305d.
* ↑ See "Chopper Down Commercial Aircraft Attacked," ABC World News Tonight, April 21, 2005, available from Lexis Nexis Academic, http://web.lexisnexiscomlibproxy.lib.unc.edu/universe/document?_m=ca7f7e7a9f83b32bf1f9a820ef6c3c1d&_docnum=3&wchp=dGLbVzb-zSkVA&_md5=91703314a928adea3dfd1889d0df326b.
* ↑ Lee Cowan, "Recent Surge of Violence Continues in Iraq," CBS Evening News, April 22, 2005, available from Lexis Nexis Academic, www.lexisnexis.comlibproxylib.unc.edu/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T5437708677&format=GNBFI&sort=BOOLEAN&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T5437708680&cisb=22_T5437708679&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=166768&docNo=1. 70. See "Video Released of Downing of Commercial Helicopter in Iraq," NBC Nightly News, April 22, 2005, available
* ↑ See "Video Released of Downing of Commercial Helicopter in Iraq," NBC Nightly News, April 22, 2005, available Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
* ↑ Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
* ↑ Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
* ↑ Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
* ↑ Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
* ↑ Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
* ↑ Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
* ↑ Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
* ↑ Page:Cori Elizabeth Dauber - YouTube War (2009).pdf/117
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