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By Edward Helmore

A week ago, many US newspapers were openly celebrating the execution of Saddam Hussein. The grim picture of the condemned Iraqi leader, a noose round his neck, was splashed across the print media with often barely concealed triumphalism.

A week on, with a backlash against a grotesque and hasty execution continuing to build, even members of the hang 'em high US press are warming to the sentiment that the execution was little more than a US-sponsored lynching in which the central player, Saddam Hussein, was the only actor to perform his part with dignity.

But as the US media recovered from the excitement of reporting the final act of a show that has preoccupied a father-son dynasty of Texan presidents, the release of videophone footage on the Internet showing Saddam being mocked and humiliated in his final moments by guards chanting the name of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr reconfirmed that the mainstream media has all but lost control of what reaches the public domain.

Nevertheless, while many have expressed disquiet at the manner of execution and worry that it will make a bad situation in Iraq worse, the widespread revulsion felt in Europe and subsequent calls for an international moratorium on capital punishment have not been heard here in Britain.

Even organizations that typically oppose the death penalty have been reluctant to oppose it on principle in the case of the former Iraqi dictator.

'Snuff reality show'

The New York Times observed that the cellphone video was, in effect, "a snuff reality show". Stripped of the pretense that the execution was the "important milestone" on the road to Iraqi democracy that US President Bush predicted, the film offered further evidence that America's foreign policy blunders since 2001 are without end.

Even the grandiloquent Times columnist Thomas L Friedman noted, "It resembled a tribal revenge ritual rather than the culmination of a constitutional process in which America should be proud to have participated."

For television executives, Saddam's video execution provided a surreal counterweight to contemporary domestic events: the start of former President Ford's funeral and singer James Brown's departure. But the implications for the media are different. On December 30, it broadcast what the Iraqi government wanted shown.

With the Internet release of the videophone footage, whatever editorial control the media had initially was swept away. This is now a familiar story: from the savage beheadings of American hostages in Iraq to Saddam's hanging, debate over what should and should not be shown has been made all-but irrelevant in the age of mobile phones and YouTube.

"The Saddam video proves again that no act is too gruesome or intimate that someone won't try to take a picture of it and share it with the wired world," said arts critic Richard Woodward in the Wall Street Journal. "We better get used to living without visual boundaries and with the curiosity and flexible morality of the viewer as the only limit on what we can see from now on."

Not much choice

In all probability, the established media no longer has much choice but to agree. The Internet is offering all possible variations of the execution pre-hanging without sound, hanging with sound, hanging without the drop and convulsions, or the full, unedited cut.
 
Media executives well understand that the audience cannot be denied or they will simply go elsewhere, taking advertisers and revenue with them.

Still, the papers are now offering other perspectives. In the Los Angeles Times, Richard Dawkins offered a novel, moralizing-free rationale for keeping ex-dictators alive: so they can be studied. Even as America's disquiet at the uneven application and incompetent administration of capital punishment grows, it has been treated as a separate issue to the execution of the former Iraqi leader. But neither the US government nor the media is promoting the execution as an example of democratic justice being served.

For the media, the pictures of the execution will be filed alongside others that tell the story of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair's Iraq adventure, Saddam's statue being toppled in 2003, the beheading of Nicolas Berg, Private Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib, the Bush "Mission Accomplished" picture aboard a US warship.

In each case, the effect of the act and the image has taken time to be fully understood.
 
(China Daily via agencies January 9, 2007)