Now We Know: Saddam Wears Briefs

So now it finally emerges -- the truth about Saddam Hussein's underwear. He wears briefs, white, probably knit.

Pictures of the nearly naked former dictator were splashed across the front page of two big newspapers Friday morning, one in London, the other in New York. Not surprisingly, both papers are owned by Rupert Murdoch.

No one seems to be happy about this, except perhaps Murdoch.

The U.S. military says the snaps, which could have been taken months ago, likely violate terms of the Geneva Guidelines for the humane treatment of detained individuals. President Bush has ordered an investigation into how the pictures came about, and how they found their way to both the London Sun and New York Post.

And of course everyone is leaping at this opportunity to bash the press. Again. Which means that the poor bastards at Newsweek magazine, who have had a sickening/awful week, may finally have a longed-for opportunity to recede behind some other publications' misery. (Newsweek has spent enough time in the doghouse, it seems to me. Its journalistic infraction was serious, but, c'mon -- the follow-up commotion was ridiculously out of proportion to the sin.)

Anyway, all the hoo-ha about the Saddam pictures raises a couple of important questions.

1. Will the Bush Administration use the controversy both to beat the press (two weeks in a row!) and simultaneously deflect attention from the worsening situation in Iraq? (I think it will, because that's what all administrations instinctively do, and which no White House team has ever done with more cunning.)

2. And once the dust has settled and we've all gone back to deconstructing Desperate Housewives, what does the publication of these photographs say about the ethics of the press?

Let's be clear: When the London Sun and the New York Post run giant color photos of an undies-clad Saddam Hussein, it says nothing, absolutely nothing, about the state of the press in America. It reflects only on Rupert Murdoch's papers, many of which are no-holds-barred tabloids and thus purpose-built to arouse readers' most primitive emotions.

Would other big-city papers have behaved in the same way? Hard to know, but few would have given the exclusive -- if not exactly easy on the eyes -- pictures such prominence. (The situation was somewhat different, of course, when the Abu Ghraib prison-scandal photos became available. They were of unquestioned news value and everyone understood that.)

Now, here's one way to grasp the contretempts concerning "Saddampants":

* If you're the editor of a Murdoch tab, you did
the right thing. You created buzz, you sold some
extra papers, and probably earned a year-end bonus.

* If you're the editor of a rival tab (such as the
New York Daily News), you're steamed. Hell, you've
been scooped, and your paper is all about scoops.

* If you're an editor of a mainstream newspaper in any other
town in America, you happily get to work this story two ways:
You can roundly condemn it, if you choose, and
accompany your condemnation with a large photo of
the Post's "detestable/offensive/unforgivable"
conduct.

* If you're Saddam Hussein -- vision probably impaired
by time spent underground -- you may focus on the
photos and think, "Well, given that I'm a geezer
in a hidden-away prison who knows where, that body doesn't
look half bad. I'm even kind of, uh, manly, you know."

With some notable exceptions, editors at newspapers, magazines, even radio and TV stations generally behave responsibly. They make tough decisions every day, often dealing in shades of gray. While they rarely intentionally seek to gross-out their readers or viewers (that always backfires), more than anything these editors covet eyeballs. Trust me on this one: At the end of the day, the game is all about getting noticed.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's extraordinarily difficult to achieve, but the top news outlets generally manage over time to balance their balance sheets while serving the best interests of their audience.

Nothing that happens as a consequence of Saddampants will change that.

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