We haven't yet had, in the West, a true crystallization of
opinion on the matter of (a) what can be shown on TV news, or (b)
what the public should be allowed to see via other media.
Divisions on these questions were very clear following the
execution of Saddam Hussein.
There was some confusion traceable to eclectic authority.
Saddam was physically imprisoned under the jurisdiction of the
U.S. Army, but he was tried by an Iraqi court, in a courtroom
made possible by U.S. caretakers. When the time for the end came,
the United States delivered Saddam to the execution site, which
was under overall U.S. control. But he was delivered into the
hands of Iraqi judges and executioners.
Here the question of authority got confused. The United
States, as a general proposition, does not permit moving pictures
of death scenes. Sometimes these are taken for the record, but
not for public exhibition. Some of the photos taken of the
medical proceedings after the shooting of President Kennedy have
not yet been released. The delicate question has to do with
prurience. Do we wish to make possible the gratification of that
sense, quite overt in some people -- e.g., the tricoteuses during
the French Revolution, who went early to make certain to get
seats for the morning's decapitations.
There is, then, a class of people who would keep their eyes
open even if they knew that what was coming up on the screen was
the neck-breaking of Saddam Hussein. At the opposite end of the
scale are those who so deplore the spectacle that they are
willing to pass laws criminalizing the exhibition, and here and
there have succeeded in doing so.
We run into a conflict in priorities. There are always those
who believe that there should be no censorship of any public
event. People who hold to that view were supported for a very
long time by moralists who believed that public exposure of the
wages of sin would diminish the incidence of sin. The anomaly was
famously exposed when, in Great Britain, capital-punishment
abolitionists drove home the point that hanging 10-year-olds for
stealing something worth sixpence had no apparent effect on the
frequency of larceny. Gradually, capital punishment was moved to
behind closed doors, though right up to the eve of World War II,
beheadings in France were done publicly.
The ambivalence is heightened by the aggressive growth in the
technology that tends to reveal all. It may be that the
journalistic infrastructure aims less at revelation in the spirit
of free speech than at satisfying appetites that we would like to
think civilization would succeed in frustrating.
But there it is: In a matter of hours, one would learn that
tuning in to any of a half-dozen Web sites would yield very
nearly a clinically complete version of what happened to Saddam
Hussein in the two minutes after the noose was strung about his
neck. It is technically possible to screen everyone admitted to a
death chamber in order to locate and embargo cameras, but as we
have vividly seen over the weekend, even when such cameras are
prohibited, the likelihood that they will be kept from the scene
is slight.
So that we face again the question we faced for so many years
awaiting the consolidation of the taboo: What are we going to do
now? And to what extent is U.S. resolve in the matter the
decisive factor? There is not a hint in Iraq of any prosecutorial
appetite to track down the spectators who took the pictures of
Saddam and peddled them with utter ease to the great brokers of
modern news, the Internet custodians.
Perhaps the public question will simply yield to practical
imperatives. We are not going to instruct the nations of the
Mideast in our protocols about viewing executions. To begin with,
we aren't even going to instruct them on whether capital
punishment will be tolerated. Public pressures tend to dictate
the answers to major questions, as when the government of Israel
made an exception for Nazis when constructing its law against
capital punishment, so that there was no impediment, a few years
down the line, to Israel's hanging of Adolf Eichmann.
We have many problems in Iraq, to which we would not wish to
add a regulation forbidding the execution of tyrants. An
obeisance of sorts was paid to the old tradition by the major
networks. They simply didn't film the neck-breaking. They looked
to one side, and probably saw it at home.