Images of War

http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&folder=193&paper=1829

This article is an interesting extension to the conversation at the end of Monday's class. Note that here is no mention of the FCC in this article.  So, why are media outlets sanitizing the depiction of war? Some highlights from this long read:

"I don't believe there was in my experience, and in my newsroom, a conscious effort to sanitize the war, to make it look cleaner than obviously war is," says Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald. "But early on, I think the pictures that our own photographers were getting or those we were relying on were pictures that probably reflected more the successes the American military was having." Fiedler doesn't remember an instance in which editors decided they couldn't run a photo because of the casualties depicted. 

Others think the media were tentative. Early on in the war, says Michel duCille, picture editor at the Washington Post, "I think all the media, including the Washington Post, we went with the wave of trying to tell the story, but we weren't going against the American authorities." (In August, the paper acknowledged in a front-page story that it didn't give enough weight to stories critical of the administration's claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.) DuCille says he doesn't think the media were consciously censoring themselves, but there was a reluctance to "come out of the gates criticizing or even seeming to criticize the Americans." He echoes Getler's comments: "Finally when that coffin situation erupted..that really made the bough break, and that I was waiting for."  

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It's difficult to get a consensus on such subjective issues: What's too graphic? What's too conservative? How much does the public's sensitivity play into editorial decisions? If anything's a given in photojournalism, it's that there are restrictions and limitations--both in what journalists can capture with a camera and what editors will show to the public. 

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James Hill, a contract photographer for the New York Times, was in Iraq for about the first seven weeks of the war. He was not embedded with a military unit, but he joined U.S. Marines three days into the conflict. "It's hard to say the media is at fault itself," he says of the lack of graphic images. Not military restrictions but simple logistics meant Hill couldn't always photograph what he saw on the road to Baghdad. "You're driving where they're driving," he says. "I was in my own Jeep... But if you're in a convoy, you're not saying, 'Hey, that's a good picture. Let's stop and take it.'"

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 The unilaterals in Baghdad faced different restrictions. Mostly being led around by Iraqi officials (before the city fell to coalition troops), journalists didn't always know the circumstances behind the carnage they were shown. Colin Crawford, assistant managing editor, photography, at the Los Angeles Times, remembers one photo taken by Carolyn Cole of two dead children in a morgue. It was a "very powerful, moving photo," he says. But Iraqis had taken journalists to the morgue, and the paper didn't know how the children had been killed. Had a journalist been able to confirm that U.S. bombs had killed them, or perhaps if Cole hadn't been led to the scene in a parade of journalists, the Times would have run the photo, Crawford says. But in this case, "we were being used," he says. "We felt manipulated, and we didn't run it."   

My favorite excerpt is the last one because it shows how photos can be taken out of context, or misrepresented and used to manipulate public opinion.  Even more importantly though, it reminded me that photographs may also accidentally be misleading. For example, a picture of the brutalized corpse of a child may be published causing a serious change in public opinion, when in reality this isolated event may not be an accurate representation of the war.