TRANSCRIPT:
HOWARD KURTZ: And the following I call troubling.
Michael Ware was one of the most familiar faces on
CNN, reporting from war zones in that loud Australian
accent. He has now left the network and is suffering
from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after having
witnessed the horrors of war.
This week, in an interview that aired on Australian
Broadcasting Corporation, Ware got more specific. He
says that in 2007, he witnessed and filmed an
atrocity, one involving a teenage boy in an Iraqi
village who was carrying a weapon.
One of the soldiers, Ware says, shot the boy in the
back of the head. The correspondent says that over
the next 20 minutes, he watched the teenager die and
was stunned by how inured he had become to violence,
like the soldiers around him. Ware also says that CNN
decided the footage was too graphic to put on the
air.
Now, television networks make those decisions all the
time, but if the footage of soldiers shooting a
teenager was considered too raw to broadcast, why
wasn't the story aired without pictures? Isn't
shooting someone in the back of a head a potential
war crime? Did CNN have any responsibility to report
this shooting to military authorities?
I wanted to put those questions to CNN executives,
but the network declined to make anyone available for
an interview. Instead, its press office issued a
brief statement.
"CNN often has to make calls about which disturbing
images are necessary to tell a story and which are
too graphic. These are always challenging, and the
subject of reasoned editorial debate. On this
occasion, we decided not to show an Iraqi insurgent
dying with fatal wounds."
Now, maybe CNN made the right call. Maybe there were
reasons not to report the story, even without
pictures. But when a news organization won't answer
questions, we have no way of knowing.
* * * * *
I would just like to add
a few clarifying remarks...
First of all, unless something drastic has happened
in the past week, Michael has not left CNN.
He is on a
one-year medical leave.
Second, Michael talked about this incident
back
in 2008. At that time, he
clearly stated: “There’s no blame here. The guy
was a legitimate target who was rightfully shot in
the head.” The ‘war crime’ he talks about
in the
second part of the Australian
documentary is the fact that it
took 20 minutes for the guy to die, during which
time the soldiers did nothing to aid him, as is
called for in the Geneva Conventions. From the
sound of it, they could not have saved his life
(half his head was blown away) but they could have
given him a shot of morphine or whatever it is
that soldiers carry these days. Instead they stood
and watched, indifferent to his suffering. And
Michael’s point in telling this story is that he
was just as numb and unfeeling as the soldiers.
That’s what war does to people.