Fergus Cassidy

Net imperative

DOES a 'picture tell a thousand' words? Sometimes. But other times a lot depends on who said or wrote those thousand words. And when.

Walter Cronkite, the once giant of American television news, was clinging steadfastly to journalistic impartiality while reporting on the war in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Until he made his now-famous broadcast titled 'Who, What, When, Where and Why'. He concluded: "To say we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory conclusion".

That was the moment US president Lyndon Johnson believed he had lost the war in Vietnam. Other senior generals involved in the war later pondered out loud on what might have been if the television and still cameras had not been allowed to record what they believed they should.

Whether as a result of this or not, any involvement of US troops in combat was strictly controlled from then on. In the two Gulf wars, reporters were subject to military discipline.

The generals appeared to loosen their grip slightly in the opening battles of the current conflict, allowing reporters to be 'embedded' with the action. With some success, the military managed to keep a tight lid on the media. Now, with the publication of gruesome images from Iraq, that lid has been opened wide.

This time, however, it was not the media which was responsible: it was non-journalists with digital cameras and mobile camera phones.

As a marker to the changes taking place in traditional communications media these days, look no further than the internet. For the first time, it may now be possible to believe that truth will not be the first casualty of war.

As regards the photographs from Iraq, there is overlooked significance in how quickly they spread around the world but also in the impossibility of preventing their release and distribution.

If one single image - like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam - was photographed by a reporter in Iraq and revealed exclusively in a trusted and respected newspaper in America, that story would be in line for national and international awards. If it was allowed to be printed.

Editors and owners would have drunk the coffee machines dry debating whether to go to press or not. That's how it has always been. Not any more.

Once an image or other information has been recorded using all manner of compact digital devices, the question of distribution is now longer solely in the hands of the publishers or television stations (in some cases the two are the same).

Donald Rumsfeld said as much last week: "We're functioning with peacetime constraints, with legal requirements, in a wartime situation in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs".

Throughout the 20th century, news travelled slow and it was far more one dimensional. A tragic plane crash might have a couple of paragraphs and no photographs. Occasionally perhaps a map of the country showing the region the accident occurred. By the time newspapers hit the streets, such information might be two to three days old and depleted of its full emotion impact.

For sure debate has raged at times about the internet and the effect it's having on society. Whether its those images of abuse from Iraq or pictures of children being abused, the finger of blame has been pointed at the net. All media - from print to radio and television -experienced this same response at one time or another.

That blame comes from the net's unique ability to disperse any kind of information around the world in seconds and mistakenly confuses distribution with how that information came to be in the first place. If we can't see horrible images or read disturbing news, does that mean the horror doesn't exist?

Concentration of media ownership is not unique to these times. The Irish Times of 19 August 1913 reported remarks from the president of the Institute of Journalists at its conference and he said "that the existing newspapers were today in the hands of fewer ownerships" and that "the Press [sic] had become commercialised".

With the internet, this century now has an alternative with enormous potential unfolding before our very eyes. As the control of information begins to unravel from its top-down tether, being informed is increasingly turning into a personal choice. Made by each of us and not on our behalf.

That information might well be a picture or a photograph, but it could also be a thousand words.