Gates to AP: Take that photo down!

Given the family's request, I don't think I would have run the photo. I disagree strongly with your contention that Americans understand what's going on over there. Reading about X number of deaths today in Iraq/Afghanistan doesn't come close to the (rightful) emotional impact of seeing what's happening. Photos and video show us more truth than can words alone.

I'm not sure this was the time to press that case, though.

 

Did any papers run this photo?

 

This aggrieved fellow says St. Pete and Wheeling, Va., did.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2141287/lance_cpl_joshua_m_bernard_photo_unleashes.html?cat=9

 

That photo is the main pic on the front page at HuffPost right now. Here's a link to the image:

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/102781/thumbs/r-AFGHAN-huge.jpg

 

I'm not sure the public grasps that. Not viscerally. Cheering for war has become something, to a lot of people, on par with belting out Lee Greenwood on the Fourth of July.

 

Obviously it sucks for them. If it were my son, I'd feel that way too. However, AP's job is not to help families grieve. AP's job is to report the news and tell stories.

What would you say if there was a fatal car accident in your town and the family said they'd prefer that your paper not report on it all because it would make it more difficult for them?

Every news story in the paper, on TV on the internet, likely offends someone. There is always someone whose life would be easier if it went unpublished. The job of a media outlet is not to weight those concerns against the general public's right-to-know.

In this case, AP weighed it and decided the picture told a story that needed to be told.

I also disagree that everyone knows there's a war going on and it sucks. The public needs to be shown things and it needs to be reminded of them.

Say it was 1960 and you got a photo and story about a black man being lynched in the south. Would you just shelve it because "everyone knows there is racism in the south"? You can't just turn a blind eye to things because some people don't want to see them.

 

Hey, where are all the cool sj lefties with their flag-draped coffin pics? I guess exploiting death just isn't the same as it used to be. What changed?

 

It's hard not to think of the many images of war from the past, World War II, Korea, Vietnam... and yet now we want to cleanse the images of war. Obfuscate the reality of it. We talk about surgical strikes etc. But I think it's dangerous for the public. The fact that the DOD is making an issue of this one picture shows how much recent war coverage has been cleansed.

 

So as one of the board's righties I'll say this: Run the photos when they're good, when they tell a story, when they help the readers understand something they may not.

And also, everybody is somebody's son or daughter. Tough s---. News is news.

 

Agree with the AP. While no one likes to see these photos, they show a glimpse of what goes on in battle.

 

Well, you sure did take a turn there from "it's not like this kid's family is going to be any less upset" to "AP's job is not to help families grieve." Those are two entirely different points, which is why I said there are news merits to both sides of the discussion.

I wouldn't have run it, for the reasons stated by others that it just might not be all that newsworthy. When the photos of the contractors burned and hanged in Iraq came over, those photos simply had to run -- they were a shocking wakeup call at a time when we were being led to believe things were going well for America. In this case, without having looked at the photo (and I won't), it doesn't sound like the circumstances of the death were overly unusual for wartime.

You're comparing all kinds of different things. To the point about the car accident, yeah, I would run a news story, but probably not a picture of the body lying on the windshield. In the lynching case, it would probably be the kind of wakeup call I mentioned with the Iraq photo, so I would have run it. (In all likelihood I would have attempted to talk to the victim's family in that situation, however.)

Again, though, your main point was that it really wouldn't matter to the family anyway. That's the unfeeling, arrogant part that people don't like about journalists, and they are correct not to like that part IMO.

 

I don't think I changed my argument, I just explained it better.

When I said it didn't matter much to the family, I meant that the potential benefit to not running the photo (one family feels better) does not outweigh the benefit to running it (millions of people are reminded there's a brutal war going on over there).

You can argue how much better the one family will feel, but I suspect they'll feel pretty lousy either way.