Originally Posted by King_of_the_Burpas

Aye it's late. But in terms of Army recruitment, they are bound to censor the horribleness in order to get people to sign up. But the civvy broadcasters? Hmmm

I think, in my humblest opinion, that they cut too much out of the reality.

Footage from Homs (and I'm not turning this into a Help Syria thread) was redacted to a series of wide shots of rockets/ T72 hits on buildings and close ups of people running out of the ruins with kids sans blood and all their limbs intact.

The journos who can get away with telling it slightly more like it is are in print, because print doesn't upset your auntie.

If you're a journalist, you should be able to film what is happening and if the kids are frightened and the parents throw up on their potato waffles, so be it: sorry, that's my view. To wank about censoring reality is NOT what proper journalism is about.

Maybe the journalists are just wank these days?

It's definitely late and I'm definitely losing it - I just spent 10 minutes searching for recent pictures of Tina Turner's legs, to see how they've aged.

Originally Posted by Pyianno

Yes I understood that - what I was trying to get at is if the objective is to give a proper representation of war, then might this effect army recruitment? Army TV adverts emphasise, variously, the sense of responsibility, belonging and adventure that come with serving. They don't show images of paraplegics who have been struck by IEDs. A proper appreciation of war among the general populace might have a socially detrimental effect. You don't ONLY want to recruit psychotics with a blood lust and bumbling toffs with dull cow eyes and a taste for port.

It's late, I'm probably just ranting.

It's a tough one but aren't they just the type of men who bring , what would be counted as, success in war or offensive actions?

After WW1, the whole Country saw, and had to live with, the effects of what 'War' really meant. It spawned a pacifist/Peace at all costs mentality..and rightly so, as this was the decision that any right minded person who saw the sadness and pain of loss and terrible injuries should come too?

War is disgusting and shitty.

injured soldiers rowing - Google Search

WHATS GOING ON /MARVIN GAYE - YouTube

Originally Posted by King_of_the_Burpas

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But the view we have on the telly of war, imho, is so santized that it bears to relation to reality. My question was how much should the broadcasters show?

My view is that the vast majority of people in the UK will live to a ripe old age, and never once witness a headless body in an RTA or have to recover body parts from a bomb scene/railway track.

I spent over 20 years as a Soldier and Police Officer, and to be honest wasn't subjected to anything so horrific that I can't get a good nights kip. (Most of my never served civvy mates would have been sectioned by now though)

So I reckon, that unless you are in the Military or one of the Emergency services, you can grow old gracefully. No need to show graphic images to those that don't need it.

Originally Posted by Nato Standard123

It's a tough one but aren't they just the type of men who bring , what would be counted as, success in war or offensive actions?

Well, George Orwell doesn't give them a clean bill of health in 'The Lion & The Unicorn' - apparently the toffs were the cause of every English military fuck up.

Dunno about the blood-lust loons. Can't imagine it's easy to discipline them.

I personally like Billy Connolly's assessment of the problem faced by Afghan men:

"They've only got one book and they never get laid. Parachute in some fire breathing whores and some Agatha Christie novels and the war would be over within a week."

Originally Posted by King_of_the_Burpas

There is a very limited view of the world pushed by the media in war zones. You don't want to puke on your fry up when the 6 comes on.

The footage is usually lots of AK fire in the air - good for pics and sound - and followed by heavily censored pictures of the aftermath of the effects of these weapons on the poor buggers on the receiving end, whenever the militias of any side remember to point them downwards before pulling the trigger.

MY question is - and no, not a lurking journo - how much of the horror should the media show?

I say this because I've just watched a militia chap from 'doesn'tmatterwhatfuckinside' say that the poor young boys, and they were boys, they put up in Sarajevo, had no idea what a round or a grenade would do to a human body. They learned the hard way, natch.

If your average Joe, or Mohammed, knew what modern weapons did to a body, would they be less likely to send people out to fight?

Too many non-professional soldiers think an AK, 2 thirty rounds mags and a sody pop to keep the sugar up is all you need to get by, until they actually see it.

I think the media should show the full fucking monte; Markale, Rwanda or wherever.

If they don't, the sanitisation of the images invites more young cretins to sign up and pop an AK out of a window, imho.

Well put it this way, would you have any reservations if your young children (if you have any) were watching in horror the full graphic images of human carnage on the 6 PM news ?

Some people in society want nothing to do with war, so why force it down their necks?

Would you like to be tied up and forced to watch BareBack Mountain end to end 24/7 ?

Graphic images of Warfare can make the innocent mentally unstable, and that is why we have proper protocol in place to control such matters.

[QUOTE=Pyianno;4224181]Well, George Orwell doesn't give them a clean bill of health in 'The Lion & The Unicorn' - apparently the toffs were the cause of every English military fuck up.

Dunno about the blood-lust loons. Can't imagine it's easy to discipline them.

I personally like Billy Connolly's assessment of the problem faced by Afghan men:


George Orwell and any other similar author e.g Martha Gellhorn, could only write about 'their' war, spun by their views and opinions, gained by their socialisation/experiences. Not a fault on their part at all, they couldn't imagine the Holocaust or AQ beheadings via video, who the hell could until we saw it with our own eyes?

Yep, should have left out the Toffs, but again, they do have their uses, and the fact that they are even there on the battlefield means that the mad as feck lunatics feel that their actions are sanctioned and even accepted ..after all, 'they are allowing me to do it, so it must be ok'.

RE Afghan.Just need loads of western porn..and/or 10k worth of dollars so that the part time talibs can feck off and be cabbies in NYC, leaving just the freaks who will implode within 10 - 20 years due to destroying what they actually need to survive.

We're currently firing £70k Rockets at snipers armed with a 100 dollar rifle.....do the fecking math.

You can see some pretty graphic stuff on liveleak if you look for it.

I went through a wee bit of an obsession with 9/11 about a year or so ago.

I'm not quite sure how it started but it may have begun with a documentary on channel four or five about the forensics crew who's job it was to sift through the rubble as it was shipped out of ground zero and identify the various body parts or even items that may have belonged to people in order to confim what happened to them. I can't remember it's name but for some reason it hooked me in. I started wanting to find out more. Anyway, at some point I realised I was being a bit of a fucking weirdo and stopped doing it but for a good few months it was a creepy hidden obsession.

It started as looking at pictures of the scenes, which became a search for pictures and videos of jumpers. Then the various phone calls from people in the towers and on the planes and that got worse, I started looking for pictures of bodies. They are extremely rare, of course, really hard to find. Even shock sites and gore sites don't have a great deal. Those that do exist are vague and distant. Which I thought was quite strange - not that I expect people to flaunt pictures of dead bodies around all the time; it's just unusual that despite the devestation there was little to see.

I am, of course, the quintessential armchair warrior type dickhead. The kind of guy who reads Andy McNab books about the SAS and wonders just how tough being a soldier is without setting foot out of the local TA centre but once or twice. So it was a natural thing for me. Go looking for it on the web whilst sitting at home eating a packet of crisps. What I did find didn't necessarily shock or bother me, it just made me think that I was a bit of a sick cunt, which is why I stopped looking.

I do, however, believe that there should be less censorship in the media but I don't think it should be plastered on BBC News at 6 o clock in the evening. I think it should be available around the internet, in certain published newspapers and I agree with the original post as to why folks should be able to find it. So they can come to terms with the reality of the situation and so that they can justify the creepy human desire to see death in all of it's disgusting forms.

I also think it's important because it's a window to the truth. Not just about the reality of bloodshed, genocide, war or terrorism (take your pick) but about the reality of the situation in these foreign countries where conflict routinely breaks out. It means that the public can look harder and get the full story of themselves. Taking Syria as a recent example where there are plenty of videos on youtube of people being dragged away to safety, dead or with serious wounds, but most videos have had the moment where the individual was actually shot removed.

There are now and have always been plenty of opportunities for the public to sample horrors, and plenty of people wanting to do so. Horror porn; Gore movies; the Roman amphitheatre. Bodies disintegrating with ever more graphic realism in video games.

People may be shocked the first time, or the first few times, but they will very quickly get used to it. Some will develop a taste for it. If people were really shocked into pacifism by the sight of the aftermath of combat, every soldier would mutiny and quit after their first contact in which serious injuries or fatalities were sustained.

Originally Posted by Your_Mums_Pal

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I do, however, believe that there should be less censorship in the media but I don't think it should be plastered on BBC News at 6 o clock in the evening. I think it should be available around the internet, in certain published newspapers and I agree with the original post as to why folks should be able to find it. So they can come to terms with the reality of the situation and so that they can justify the creepy human desire to see death in all of it's disgusting forms...

You have of course answered your own thoughts there YMP, graphic scenes ARE available on the Internet, with no censorship, it's just a case of digging around for it. You can google 'Taliban beheadings' and spend hours trawling through crap and still not find an unedited version, that's because Google doesn't search through every nook and cranny that makes up the internet, nor do most of the other popular search engines.

But it is out there, and thankfully tucked away from all but the most determined searcher.

Censorship in one form or another has always been with us, and I suspect always will be. I have nothing to back this up, but I reckon if the whole of the UK adult population were polled, only a minority would want unadulterated graphic news images on their HD widescreen 3D televisual machines at anytime, let alone at 6pm.