American bodies) are not shown, has been noted before by a variety of critics and scholars.[1] For this reluctance to show the human body in extremis to be trumped, a particular image must be judged to be extraordinarily newsworthy, and, even then, there is tremendous sensitivity in the way a particular image is displayed. This sensitivity is present in both broadcast and print news outlets. So, for example, the images of American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were judged so newsworthy that they were widely used by American newspapers, but almost never on the front page.[2] One of Ms. Logan's own pieces was shunted to the CBS website, but was not aired on the nightly news, apparently because it was not judged newsworthy enough to overcome the degree of graphic-ness in the story.[3] The image of the bodies of four American contractors killed in Fallujah, their bodies mutilated and hung from a bridge, was used by all three broadcast networks and a wide variety of newspapers—but such a broad range of decisions was made about how to alter the image to make it "acceptable," through cropping or pixellating,[4] (which was not the case for the Mogadishu pictures) that very few Americans saw the image as it was originally taken. As a result, unlike previous iconic images, so many versions were seen that there is not a single immediately recognizable image that will stand the test of time. People remember the story, but it is doubtful they will recognize the image because people saw the image in so many different forms.[5]
Some have argued that this is some kind of ideological choice made to sanitize war itself and make it more acceptable. But, in fact, the American news system sanitizes every type of story that involves bodies. That included the coverage of September 11,
57
- ↑ See Sean Aday, "The Real War Will Never Get On Television: An Analysis of Casualty Imagery in American Television Coverage of the Iraq War," Paper presented at the International Studies Association, March 18-20, 2004, Montreal, Canada, available from ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/pmt/exhibits/1537/Aday.pdf.
- ↑ A reporter surveyed metro dailies and found that the photograph of the corpse (he does not specify which of the series) ran on the front page of only 11 out of 34, including the New York Times and USA Today. Fifteen put the photograph inside the front section, while another eight, including the Baltimore Sun and the Dallas Morning News, declined to use the image at all. Lou Gelfand, "If You Ran the Newspaper," Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 19, 1993, available from Lexis/Nexis.
- ↑ This became the subject of a small controversy on the web when an email circulated from Ms. Logan asking people to reach out to CBS and ask that the piece be aired on the news, rather than the less visible outlet of the Internet venue. See www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/01/24/helping-lara-logan/#logan-letter, accessed October 28, 2007. As was probably inevitable, given heated feelings about the war and the way feelings about the way the war was being covered became a proxy for those feelings, this rapidly became a target people could use to fight through larger issues.
- ↑ "Pixellation" is the high-tech blurring used by television networks when they break an image down to the "pixels that are used to create it, reversing the process in such a way as to make it impossible to tell what it is supposed to be.
- ↑ For a list of which newspapers presented the photograph in what way, see David D. Perlmutter and Lisa Hatley Major, "Images of Horror From Fallujah," Nieman Reports, Vol. 58, Summer 2004, p. 73.
