I got little in this world, I’ve give honestly, without regret, $100 for that picture. I remember taking a picture . . . (Voices of Old People, Bookends, Simon and Garfunkel, 1968)
I can’t remember when I began noticing, but for months now many national news broadcasts include at least one story that has video preceded with a warning to viewers about the gruesome nature of what is about to be shown. Usually the footage is from police body cameras or citizen cell phones. It is rarely the product of professional journalism. When I hear the warnings I think of both liability and ratings. If a viewer might claim to be traumatized by having seen “disturbing” footage on the news, the disclaimer might offer some legal protection for the networks. I can imagine counsel to NBC, CBS, and ABC requiring the news anchors to make these statements before airing the videos. I suspect advertisers like it too. Can you imagine someone preparing dinner in the kitchen with the TV on, only paying half attention until hearing those words? Most would stop what they were doing to look at the screen. More disturbing videos could lead to more viewers in the end.
There is little doubt in my mind that the proliferation of digital video serves the public interest and the cause of justice. Recently the Peloton corporation recalled its home treadmill after a personal video recorded a child getting caught underneath an active machine while playing on it. Without the video evidence and the resulting publicity it’s doubtful the safety of these machines would have been called to the public’s attention. In 2015 Mother Jones magazine published a list of 13 police killings captured on video in the past year. According the the article, “. . . More such incidents appear to be getting captured on video than ever before, due in part to the ubiquity of cell phone cameras. The footage – not only from cellphones, but also surveillance cameras, dashboard cameras in police cars, and police-worn body cameras – has caused a tectonic shift in public awareness.”
There is no need for me to go into detail about the murder of George Floyd or the countless other instances of police killings that would never have reached public awareness without video evidence, and without the evidence being shown by the broadcast news. Perhaps it has brought us to a point in history where it can no longer be denied that systemic hostility, cruelty, brutality, and injustice exists in the way police regard and treat the black community and black men in particular, and we might finally be starting to deal with it appropriately. But we should also be concerned about a potential backlash, similar to the right wing reaction to the election of Joe Biden, and their attempt to restrict voting rights in Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and practically every other Republican-controlled state in the country. Will we see legislation introduced to ban police dashboard cameras and body cameras, and intimidate citizens from recording police behavior? Will legislators attempt to restrict the use of recorded evidence in the courtroom?
Today digital footage is demonstrating to white, middle-class Americans what urban, poor, black Americans face on their streets and in their neighborhoods. In a similar way, television brought foreign war into the living rooms of comfortable Americans in the 1960s, when we saw nightly footage of the horrors of the Vietnam War. We saw actual wounded and dead soldiers. We saw blood and bandages and missing limbs. We saw burning jungles, crashing helicopters, screaming mothers and children running from pursuing armed men in uniforms. We heard first-hand accounts from our brothers, cousins, neighbors and classmates (those of us not over there ourselves) that there was no clear distinction between ally and enemy. We came to learn that what we were told by our leaders at home was going on over there, and what was actually happening were in direct contradiction, based on first-hand accounts from those witnessing and recording the truth.
The war in Afghanistan is the longest running war in American history by ten years. It has been argued that this war has persisted in part due to its taking place far from the consciousness of the American public. We don’t see nightly news stories or videos, we don’t hear much from reporters who have been sent there to cover the action. Somewhere along the line it must have been determined that the effort was going to take place quietly, with little controversy, banking on America’s contempt for Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. We hear accounts of soldiers reenlisting, and “thank you for your service” is a common refrain repeated whenever we’re in the presence of someone in uniform. But we also hear many stories of men and women coming back with PTSD, of widespread sexual assault among our troops, and of questionable success in a remote country that most Americans could not pinpoint on a map. Now that President Biden has announced his plan to end the U.S. involvement in the war, there will be much controversy, second guessing, and conflicting information on what has taken place there since 2001. How would things have been different if we’d had the media coverage of that war that we had in Vietnam, or if the troops wore body cameras?
Simon and Garfunkel recorded and released “Bookends” in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, and at a time when the country was sharply divided over our involvement in that war. The album contained a two minute and seven second track called “Voices of Old People” that started with an elderly man remembering an old photo that he would pay a lot of money to have in his possession again. Listening to that voice more than fifty years after it was recorded makes me think about how abundant digital images are today and how casually we use our phones to take snapshots that we will never look at again. On the other hand, for every photograph that man had of a loved one who might have died, I probably have 200 or 300 digital images of a person I loved and lost to cancer, and each once is priceless to me. Likewise, in considering the George Floyd case, there is no way to place a monetary amount on the way those dashboard camera, body camera, and cell phone videos are helping us understand the value of a human life.