Agenda? What Agenda? (Part “Who can keep track?”)

Instapundit links to Mudville Gazette, who reports on the news media debating the use of graphic images of American dead to influence American politics:

“War is a horrible thing. It is about killing,” ABC News “Nightline” Executive Producer Leroy Sievers said in an unusual message to the program’s e-mail subscribers discussing the issues posed by Wednesday’s killings. “If we try to avoid showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make it too easy to go to war again.”

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The pictures from Wednesday’s attack, Rosenstiel said, could anger viewers or “engender disenchantment about the war.”

“These are the kinds of pictures that will linger,” said John Schulz, dean of Boston University’s College of Communications and a former faculty member at the National War College.

“They’ll be there in November when people go to vote.” (From the LA Times)

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It has got to give the American public pause about this question of how welcome we are there,” says Robert Dallek, a presidential biographer who studied Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure during World War II and Lyndon Johnson’s during Vietnam. “This is not Vietnam, but it is reminiscent of Vietnam.” (From USA Today)

So, let me see if I understand this. The media doesn’t show us graphic images of Americans killed in, say the Cole attack, or the bombing of the Marine Barracks, or the people leaping from the WTC to their deaths, or the pieces of Israelis blown up by suicide homicide bombers because that might make us want to go to war, but they will show graphic images of dead Americans killed in Iraq so that we’ll decide that the war isn’t worth the cost, and we won’t find it “easy to go to war again.”

In other words, the press has now admitted blatantly that its job is not to inform us, but to manipulate us, and their manipulation is directed to keep us from going to war, and to discourage us if we are at war.

Yet this isn’t to be considered treason.

Update: The Puppyblender also points to Ed Driscoll, who says very much the same thing I did, but with more links to more examples.