Freedom Of The Press???

[The Reaper]

Perhaps her last moments could be preserved for posterity and the entertainment of her readers. Hopefully, she would have no problems with that.

I am relatively certain that her editors and publishers would be okay with priniting her demise. It is, after all, about the money.

TR

[Box]

I can only wish that she someday is given all of the respect she is due as she fades from this life.
best wishes ma'am

[Richard]

From the Stars and Stripes...and so it goes...

A tough but correct call on photo of dying Marine
Mark Prendergast, Stars and Stripes, 6 Sep 2009

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates went to extraordinary lengths last week to try to persuade a major news organization not to make public a photo of a 21-year-old Marine rifleman dying in Afghanistan, saying that to do so over the express objections of the family was “unconscionable” and “appalling.”

The Secretary’s appeal, made in a phone call and letter to Tom Curley, president and CEO of the Associated Press, was rejected. The AP stood by its decision to distribute the picture to its clients and also made the photo available to all on its Web site.

It was a tough call, but the right one.

A number of news organizations did use the dark, somewhat fuzzy picture, according to the trade publication Editor & Publisher, but a number of others, including the Stars and Stripes newspaper, did not.

Those that chose to run it should not be faulted, nor should those that chose not to. This was a difficult editorial decision that each news outlet had to make for itself, based on its own standards and sense of its audience.

As hard as it may be to view that picture, especially for the Marine’s family, it belongs in the public domain as a legitimate piece of visual history in a conflict that as of this writing has taken 562 American lives in combat, with no end in sight.

It honors his death, and those of all others, by showing what it means to give one’s life for one’s country. It is also a testament to courage and comradeship. Two fellow Marines can be seen risking their own lives to tend to their fallen buddy under fire.

Suppressing or withholding the photo would have ill served the open society that the dead Marine, Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard of New Portland, Me., gave his life to serve so well so far from home.

Secretary Gates’ arguments should have been part of every responsible editor’s deliberation, but it was never Gates’ decision to make nor, and I say this with great disquietude, the Bernard family’s. A free press is messy, even painful as here, but as Jefferson counseled, it is essential to our form of government.

The American military and visual journalists have a long and sometimes stormy relationship dating to the Civil War, when Mathew Brady and his associates used a camera – “the eye of history,” he called it – to document war and warriors, including the fallen. Viewers far removed from the fields of battle were shocked by the graphic carnage, and editorialists worried that relatives would recognize loved ones among the photographed corpses.

By World War I, governments had come to respect and even fear the power of visual imagery, and photos of that conflict were censored along with news accounts.

The proscription on images of American war dead lasted until 1943, when President Roosevelt was finally convinced that showing the ultimate sacrifice that combat troops were making overseas would stiffen, not weaken, spines on the World War II Home Front.

Many people blame unfettered press coverage for the loss of Vietnam, especially the nightly TV footage of dead and wounded GI’s being lugged to helicopters in jungle clearings.

That sentiment led to renewed efforts at strict news management, if not outright censorship, during the 1983 Grenada invasion, which I could cover only Stateside, the 1989 Panama invasion and the 1991 Gulf War, which I covered (or rather tried to) from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

A decade after the Gulf War, Walter Cronkite, who had been a front-line correspondent in World War II and later reported from Vietnam, observed in The Christian Science Monitor that “as a result of the censorship in the Persian Gulf, we have lost our history” – especially the military, who had been deprived of “independent news people out taking pictures or writing...with the troops in action.”

By the time of the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Pentagon realized it had little hope of controlling the press, for no other reason than it had lost control of the means of transmission. Journalists who can talk and upload text and images directly to their newsrooms are not easily tamed.

Thus the concept of embedding journalists with units to share the rigors and dangers of war was reborn. Empathy would be asked to replace censorship.

Much has been written critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the “victim or villain” stereotype of Americans who wear or wore the uniform endures in some quarters. But it is heartening that news coverage has for the most part evolved back to where at the individual level, military service is generally appreciated and portrayed for what it is.

AP photographer Julie Jacobson did nothing unkind or untoward by photographing Bernard’s final moments from a short distance off and passing that image on to her editors. One need only read the compelling, sensitive account she co-wrote to appreciate the depth of what she both witnessed and experienced.

If the camera is the eye of history, shutting it to a moment as stark and full of meaning as what transpired on that Afghan roadside Aug. 14 would constitute a warping of history. Bernard was a Marine at war. Jacobson was a war correspondent chronicling his patrol and all that entailed, including his being struck down by enemy fire. Everyone was doing their duty.

The photo is disturbing but not prurient. She did not alter or intrude herself on events by taking it. There is no issue of publication before notification of kin. Bernard was buried more than a week before the AP distributed the photo with the proviso to editors not to make it public until the next day, to give them time to weigh using it.

The AP took the additional step of advising the family of its intention to run the picture. That relatives asked after viewing it that it be withheld is powerful and persuasive but not dispositive.

Families have – and should have – the power to forbid coverage of the return of their fallen loved ones to Dover Air Force Base. Those are demonstrably private moments, and I detest the exploitation of war dead by people who would use images of flag-draped caskets to assail the very causes that the people in those caskets died for.

But war is a public undertaking and death on a battlefield is a public event, especially when journalists have been invited along to chronicle the waging of war.

I say this not only as a journalist but also as a former soldier who long ago held a young comrade on a battlefield as the life slipped out of him, and as one who later stood before that man’s relatives recounting his last moments and watching their anguished eyes peer back into the last ones their loved one ever saw.

Americans today wear their uniforms voluntarily and proudly, and rightly so, but we also need pictures like Jacobson’s to remind us of Robert E. Lee’s admonition, that it is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.

http://blogs.stripes.com/blogs/right...o-dying-marine

[Razor]

A tough but correct call on photo of dying Marine
Mark Prendergast, Stars and Stripes, 6 Sep 2009

Mr. Prendergast is certainly allowed his opinion. I would point out, however, that the opinion of this career journalist on this subject truly comes of no surprise when one reflects on the headlines of many of his recent articles as S&S ombudsman:

"Reporting the News With A Life in the Balance"
"Mosul Unit Wrong to Bar Stripes Reporter"
"In the News Business, Its Nothing Personal"
"Battle Brews Over 1st Amendment on the Battlefield"
"To See or Not to See"

Or perhaps we could have predicted his stance on this matter by reading his 2007 account of a possible active shooter incident at St. John's University, where he teaches journalism:

"I decided to use our predicament as a "teaching moment."

Here we were in the middle of a major news event. Where do we turn for information? One student said the university Web site, but there was only a short pop-up notice repeating the broadcast alert message.

The campus newspaper? Nope, last week's issue still up. We decided blogs and citizen journalism sites were too unreliable.

So we began trolling the major news sites on the Web, just as my students last year did during the Virginia Tech tragedy.

All the major New York media sites had reports brimming with information. Some even had pictures." *

Surely, we commoners need to let the "professionals" in the reporting world decide what is and isn't news, as they make better guardians of what's true and right. Just ask Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, Peter Arnett and Richard Kaplan.

In the FWIW department, I'm betting the good citizens of New Portland have their own opinions of Mr. Prendergast's view on this issue.

* http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_c...wn_into_t.html

[Richard]

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

- Oscar Wilde

Richard's $.02

[Razor]

Originally Posted by Richard

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

- Oscar Wilde

Very good!

[Dozer523]

Great post Razor. I will contine the article you cite:
Cont.
"Of course, reality kept intruding. Every time someone in the milling crowd out in the lobby bumped the door or it was cracked open, we jumped. Despite the distractions, which soon included sirens and the whup-whup-whup of a police helicopter overhead, we kept talking about the need for reliable information.
We talked about the divergent interests of newsmakers and news reporters. The university was quick to put out the initial information, but not much else.
That's because the university's interest was in controlling a potentially dangerous situation, protecting its community from harm and perhaps protecting its image.
On the other hand, the interest of journalists - and us as players in a life-and-death drama - was to find out as much as possible.
We learned from the news media that a second suspect might have been involved - apparently not true - and that the building in which the incident took place was next door.
We also gleaned background on the suspect, the type of weapon he had and that a Halloween mask somehow came into play.
Suddenly it was over. The lockdown ended and I went back to my office across from the building where the events unfolded - safe, sound and hopeful that we learned something from it all.

The coloring is mine, of course. But two things were apparent to me 1 the reason behind the actions. Newsmakers desire control the effect of the information on the situation (best case they want to do no greater harm) news gathers want all the available information (best case they want a clearer picture,now; data, impressions, even distractions to be sifted later for as true a picture as possible to be developed. The S-2 says "Information can be wrong, Intelligence is never wrong, Intelligence may need to be re-evaluated based on improved information.

BTW. You are correct, the editors did not make an error (as I called it). You called it correctly -- they made a decision. One I wish they had made differently.

[Sigaba]

FWIW, the New York Times on line edition has published a blog entry that discusses the controversy in a broader context. That entry is available here.