The Numbing Effect

摘要

Television is a gallery of agony and infamy whose pictures have stunning potency. But how lasting? Such pictures have tradition, from NBC's live camera on Jack Ruby's gunning down Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 to the 9/11 terror and this month's circulated photos of U.S. troops abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, "If there were no pictures, there would be no story," someone noted on CNN recently, stating a maxim that defines most TV news, unfortunately. It's applicable now to a prison scandal whose signature image so far―dark and surreal―is a prisoner attached to wires while standing on a box, hardly wide enough for his bare feet, in a cape-like garment and hood.