Seeing is Believing

Any advertiser will tell you its much easier to sell something with pictures. As primates, our primary sense is sight. Pictures are powerful. They are powerful whether you want to disuade women from having abortions, or whether you want to highlight the costs of war. Dennis Prager puts it nicely, "We care about what we can see." This is one of the reasons we make Peterson a giant news event, and ignore genocide in Sudan. The Earthquake in Bam lacked the flood of pictures and quickly fell from memory, despite 30,000 dead. The Ache Tsunami has dozens of home videos taken by tourists on the beaches and in hotel rooms watching as the water comes in. The death toll there was roughly 120,000 (maybe 180,000) and so was four to six times as bad, but the pictures were fantastic. Bam was a headline for several days. Ache was the news for over a week, and clung to the headlines for even longer. People have mostly forgotten the Bam earthquake, but most will always remember the Tsunami. That's the power of pictures.

Laura Ingraham and James Dobson, among others, have been pushing ultrasounds as a method for preventing abortions. That's fine, to a point. I have no probem with people being a little more cognizant of what they are doing, and as I said above, we don't know nearly as well until we see a thing. But many of these commontators on the right, especially Ingraham complains about the liberal media's bad news pictures comming out of Iraq. The Left wants us to see pictures of killed and maimed servicemen, as well as Iraqis, because they know that confronted with pictures, some people will go soft on the war. I know a lot of people who just don't give the war enough thought to remind themselves what the alternative death toll would be, from an Iraqi dictator, or from terrorists striking at pizzarias, discos, train stations, and other civilian targets rather than at armored soldiers who can shoot back. "We care about what we can see."

My complaint is that when each takes their own issue, they claim they just want the information to get out, because more information is a good thing. The other guys, however, are biased advocates who are using prejudicial, provacative pictures. These conflicting claims have to go both ways. People want to use pictures because they're effective, and they want an effective medium because they are advocates. There are people like Jim Pinkerton, who argue that information wants to be free, and tends to be a free speech absolutist, but for many people, only their information deserves a free hearing, and the rest should be criticized.

Along these lines (though no pictures are involved) is the contraversy over Ward Churchill. Academics, like Bill Bennett and Glenn Reynolds are standing up for the principle of free speech and academic freedom, even while criticizing the Churchill's ideas. Bennett frequently asserts that the best way to deal with bad speech is to counter it with good speech, not to suppress it. This is, of course, Mill's notion that the best test for an idea is rigourous scrutiny, not protection.