Should Newspapers Air Images of Deaths in Iraq?

By: Greg Mitchell Last week, The New York Times probed the lack of images of American deaths in Iraq since the start of the war in 2003 (a subject often covered by E&P, if few others, during this span). The news hook was the recent dis-embedding from the U.S. military of freelance photographer Zoriah Miller for allegedly breaking a kind of ban on such photos. He denies this.

In presenting the story in print and on the Web, the Times published one of Miller's fatal photos.

In his column today, the paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, notes that this was the first photo of that type the Times had published in at least the past year, and reviews some of the controversies in this area it has navigated in years' past.

Gail Buckland, an author and professor of photo history at Cooper Union in New York, tells Hoyt that she informs her students that in this matter they are ?more impoverished today than Americans were in the 19th century. The greatest dishonor you can do is to forget. Photographs are monuments.?

But Hoyt, who led Knight Ridder's much-praised coverage in the runup to the Iraq invasion, comments: "But before war photographs pass into history, they are news and records of events that are still raw for everyone involved ? soldiers, families and journalists. The experiences of The Times in recent years with searing pictures of injury and, in one case, imminent death, suggest how emotional, complicated and unpredictable the issues can be."

Hoyt concludes: "Painful as these issues are....I think The Times has an obligation to pursue stories and photographs that report the entire experience of war, including death."

Executive Editor Bill Keller told him, ?Death and carnage are not the whole story of war ? there is also heroism and frustration, success and setback, camaraderie and, on occasion, atrocity ? but death and carnage are part of the story, and to launder them out of our account of the war would be a disservice.?

The full column is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/opinion/03pub-ed.html
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Greg Mitchell's new book on Iraq and the media has several chapters on photography and the war. It is titled "So Wrong for So Long."