IRAQI PRISONERS Poll: Many say press overdoes coverage

There are some people who want to see the photos that haven't been shown yet.
CHICAGO (AP) -- It has been all but impossible to miss the widely circulated photos of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, which set off an all-out news media blitz. And there are more images that have yet to be made public.
But when is enough enough?
A recent CBS News poll found that while 55 percent of respondents said the prison abuse scandal is "very serious" problem, 61 percent felt the press has spent too much time on coverage, compared with 49 percent who said the same shortly after the news broke in late April.
Associated Press reporters in several regions of the country fanned out this week to talk to Americans about the issue, catching many people as they took time to sip coffee or settle down for a meal.
Several college students near Chicago bucked the national poll, fervently calling for more, or all, the photos to be made public.
Wants to see more
They included Michaela DeSoucey, a 26-year-old graduate student in sociology at Northwestern University who thinks there should be more coverage of the scandal, not less.
"I think people are too afraid to confront what's going on beyond their coffee and muffin," DeSoucey said as she sat outside the Unicorn Cafe in Evanston, Ill., with her sheep dog, Mickey. "Maybe it's just the conspiracy theorist in me, but I think there's a reason they're being hidden."
Inside the cafe, Tom Graber, a 32-year-old math instructor at Northwestern, agreed that the coverage has been worthwhile. Because of it, he said, "my impression is that reporters have been more aggressive" about war coverage in general.
Others -- no matter their opinion of the war -- have had enough and are experiencing what you might call "abuse fatigue."
Leslie Johnson, a 27-year-old New Yorker who was stepping out of a Starbucks coffee house in Harlem on her day off, said she thinks it's "good for people to see the other side" of war.
But coverage of the prison abuse in Iraq has reminded her of the twin towers falling on Sept. 11, 2001.
"When 9/11 happened, they kept showing the buildings being hit," she said. In this case, too, she's "had enough of seeing it."
"You don't want to see people being humiliated," said Johnson, who works in publishing.
Getting upset at the U.S.
Jean Dorsainvil, a 52-year-old New Yorker who's originally from Haiti, said he's cut back on his consumption of stories about the prison abuse because he was starting to get upset at the United States.
"I started building hate in my heart," said Dorsainvil, a fire safety director for a Manhattan building.
He thinks it's important that people involved are punished but wants the press to stop showing the images. "If you keep showing the pictures, you inflame things," he said.
Even at the 35th Street Bistro in the Seattle neighborhood of Fremont -- where it's difficult to find someone who supports the war -- people were more than ready to stop seeing the images.
"I kind of just turn it off now. It's just kind of disappointing," said Jennifer Lim, a 35-year-old restaurant server who was dining at the bistro.
She also worries about its impact on the United States' image overseas -- since she already found it to be low during her travels to southeast Asia and Mexico a few years ago.
Steven Clegg, a 21-year-old mechanic from Cross Lanes, a suburb of Charleston, W.Va., agrees that there's been too much coverage. He's even found himself questioning the photos' authenticity.
But either way, he said the scandal was bound to affect people's thinking about the war, including his own.
"I still wonder what we're doing over there," he said.
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