Professional Issues
AP’s dead Marine photo violates its own embed agreement and the wishes of a dead Marine’s family. Gates objects. NYT.
The journal entries of AP Photog Julie Jacobson regarding the incident in which Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard was killed are compelling reading. via Miami Herald. Real deal, descriptions of heavy combat. She says the Marines tried to ice her out because she was a woman, but she insisted on going, and when she hung in through great heat and fire, they decided they liked her and started inviting her along. Fighting men are quick to adopt anyone who will share their miseries and hazards, and the contact often enhances mutual appreciation for what the others do. She says the grunts saw the casualty photos on her screen … all electronic, transmitted from laptop via sat phone these days … and were just curious, didn’t raise any objections. Then she goes into a discussion about her decision to transmit the photo to AP New York, to advocate publication in violation of the agreement she had signed.
In this business, you always shoot. Publishing the photos that violate the embed rules you’ve agreed to and more importantly violate the family’s wishes is another matter altogether, though.
This controversy prompted an email exchange among some combat vet friends of mine, who recalled incidents of news photogs being threatened if they tried to shoot the dead in Vietnam and voiced revulsion at the AP’s actions in this case. I weighed in with my own perspective as a newsman, with combat embed experience.*
It’s a tough issue. Remember those shots of people falling from the Twin Towers? I know a photog who was there and didn’t shoot the jumpers, thought it was in bad taste. Too bad. Wrong call. You always shoot. Whether you publish or not is another matter. But the images other photogs shot of people falling were some of the most evocative photos, gut-punch photos that drove home exactly what was done to those people. The utter loneliness and resignation and finality of the act of falling when the alternative is burning. The image is etched in my brain. I’ve never forgotten it, any more than the deaths I have witnessed firsthand, that etched live images. It reminds me what this is about.
My professional feeling is, violent death happens and people should know about it. I don’t mind sticking it in people’s faces, and agree with some of Jacobson’s points on compelling people to acknowledge what is happening in their name and on their behalf. The United States government has struggled with this issue for a long time, initially banning photos of the dead in World War II, and then, for purposes of shocking the homefront, allowing publication of non-identifiable photos of the dead. Some of those photos, of GIs half buried in the sand at the waterline in the Pacific, are instantly recognized images that convey as best can be conveyed remotely the horror of an amphibious assault, a similar sense of loss, and the loneliness and finality of death much as the 9/11 jumper shots did, and a jarring sense what a generation of young men faced for us. Ernie Pyle described the dead intimately and poignantly in Normandy and Italy. Matthew Brady and others photographed them in their most vulnerable state, horrific states of decomposition that are at the same time heartwrenching and evocative, at Gettysburg, Antietam and other scenes of unimagineable carnage.
All that said, I entirely understand the reaction of families and grunts who don’t want their dead photographed. And as a practical matter for a news organization, the closer to home the death is, the less likely it is to be published, though. For example, third world death is more like to run. American death, more of a problem. Death down the street, that can be a big problem.
NYT has a couple of the photos and a discussion here. The photo in question is not tight, not well composed, not great photographically as Jacobson notes. You can see the violence of the wound Bernard suffered, and it shows two Marines working on their comrade, intent on their business with a sort of matter of fact quality to their actions. From a short distance, there is a odd, detached sort of banality to it as there often is with death in war when you see it firsthand, perhaps in part because of the photographic shortcomings of the image mentioned above. What you can see, maybe the single strongest element of the image, is that Lance Cpl. Bernard appears to have moved beyond all of these concerns now. There appears to be soething like peace on his face, though maybe it is shock or just the absence of anguish.
I believe there are photos of identifiable wounded that have run, not sure whether the photogs were embedded or not. Here’s the AP’s own article about the controversy. I’m not seeing anywhere whether the AP or Jacobson have been ejected from the embed or not. I’m an advocate of heavy embedding and wish the AP would do more of it. It has allowed news organization unprecendented access to combat operations and other realities our soldiers contend with, as well as greater access to the civilian populations than would otherwise be practical in remote combat areas, as amply demonstrated by committed freelance embeds such as Michael Yon. The public’s, the media’s and the politicans’ understanding of the Iraq war suffered when news organizations pulled back, particularly during initial stages of the Surge. Contrary to some of the criticism leveled over the past few years from various media commentators, it is not the media that has had to compromise its interests so much as the military, which has asked soldiers to surrender a great deal of privacy and expose themselves to scrutiny under the most difficult of circumstances, while units have been asked to risk lapses in operational security as well as intense scrutiny of all actions. This is unprecedented in military history, is a credit to goodwill and competence of the United States military, and six years on from the first Iraq invasion embeds, has proven highly successful for all involved, despite sporadic conflicts between the cooperating parties. Outside of some individual cases of overzealousness, the Pentagon has held up its end of the agreement and so has the media. All of us, the American people, have benefited.
In this case, if the Pentagon wants to maintain its rule of not allowing identifiable casualty photos,** given not only the overt rules violation but the AP’s decision to ignore the Bernard family’s repeated objections, the Pentagon probably ought to bounce both the photog and the AP, if only from the operation in question. Either that or ditch the rule. The AP has no moral leg to stand on. In this business, you make a deal, you stick with it, until some extraordinary circumstances arise that call the deal into question. The horrible combat death of Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard and the resulting photograph do not represent an extraordinary circumstance within the context of the deal. It is an expected circumstance of the sort AP had agreed to terms on.
* Several soldiers in the unit I was with were wounded, none killed, and I withheld names until notifications had been made, which was not particularly taxing for me, being a scribbler, not a shooter. The dead I saw, including those in the moment of being killed, were enemy combatants. The embed posed some other professional challenges and conflicts, as extended intimate proximity in trying circumstances inevitably will do, but none of the sort described above. Separate issue, of about 30 embeds attached to 2nd Brigade of the 3rd ID in the invasion of Iraq, three were as a result of enemy fire and another died of an embolism suspected to be the result of three weeks spent in cramped tracks. Two other non-embedded journalists were killed by fire from the tank company I was attached to in Baghdad, when they were mistaken for Iraqi artillery observers.
Another kind of embed challenge worth recalling is the NBC newsman who shot footage of an American soldier killing a wounded Iraqi insurgent who had ostensibly surrendered, though the insurgent had been left unsecured and was behaving suspiciously. Ultimately, the footage enhanced everyone’s understanding of the hard, split-second choices soldiers face in the unforgiving circumstances of combat.
** Some clarification on a complicated issue: Turns out it is not a Pentagon rule but a Marine Corps rule, and there is some small but significant variation.
The CentCom embed agreement currently in effect in Afghanistan places no condition on casualty images aside from requiring a delay in publication to allow next-of-kin notifications to be made. Contrary to my recollection, neither did the rules in effect during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. However, the New York Times reports that the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade asked embedded press accompanying operations in Helmand Province to agree to terms that include the following:
“Casualties may be covered by embedded media as long as the service member’s identity and unit identification is protected from disclosure until OASD-PA [Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Public Affairs] has officially released the name. Photography from a respectful distance or from angles at which a casualty cannot be identified is permissible.”
Jacobson’s Afghan journal entry, excerpted below, makes it clear she believed she was violating a blanket ban on graphic, identifiable images of the dead. An AP exec is quoted by the New York Times as saying the AP was “very careful to respect the letter of the military embed rules,” and the argument can be made that this is true. The clause doesn’t specifically say that close, disrespectful, identifiable photographs are impermissable, so AP execs technically can argue they are respecting the letter of the embed rules, even if they are being cute about it.
The AP also acknowleges the implied Marine Corps objective of respectful treatment in images, however. The same AP exec was quoted by NYT as saying that the photo was taken at a distance, with a long lens. Jacobson says it was 10 yards. Not very far for a news photog, and in combat, no distance at all. She was close enough to be amazed she wasn’t hit.
Regardless, the photo of LCpl. Joshua Bernard dying is both highly identifiable and shows his fatal wound in disturbing detail, which undermines the AP’s claim of a respectful distance, though they claim graininess and darkness of the image obscure both.
Here’s the excerpt from Jacobson’s journal:
To publish or not is the question. The image is not the most technically sound, but his face is visible as are his wounds. Many factors come into play. There’s the form we signed agreeing to how and what we would cover while embedded. It says we can photograph casualties from a respectable distance and in such a way that the person is not identifiable. Then you think about the relatives and friends of Bernard. Would you, as a parent, want that image posted for all the world to see? Or even would you want to see how your son died? You’d probably want to remember him another way. Although, it was interesting to watch the Marines from his squad flip through the images from that day on my computer (they asked to see them). They did stop when they came to that moment. But none of them complained or grew angry about it. They understood that it was what it was. They understand, despite that he was their friend, it was the reality of things.
Then there’s the journalism side of things, which is what I am and why I’m here. We are allowed to report the name of the casualty as soon as next of kin has been notified. It is necessary and good to recognize those who die in times of war. But to me, a name on a piece of paper barely touches personalizing casualties. An image brings it home so much closer.
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Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:58 am Comments (6) on Saturday, September 5, 2009
6 Responses to “Professional Issues”
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September 5th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
My opinion is that the AP violated the rules of human decency in ignoring the family’s request not to publish the photo of their son’s mortal wounding. It was a heartless decision made in the interest of boosting their ratings (and possibly shoring up their increasingly impoverished “progressive” bias).
That said, I would think that, in the absence of family or expressed moral objections, our young military men and women would want the world to know of the sacrifices they’ve made, and continue to make, on our behalf.
Above all, I don’t want Lance Cpl. Bernard’s death to be for nothing (that is, sacrificed in the face of abject surrender in this Long War).
September 5th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
What I object to, mostly, is the combination of arrogance and assclownery with which the AP has responded to all of this. I have been unhappy with them for some time, and now I’ve concluded that their hypocrisy is no longer anything I wish to have anything to do with. I’ve just cancelled my last two newspaper subscriptions with messages that I’m doing so due to their use of the AP and my hope that the AP soon vanishes.
September 5th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
One thing besides the loss of integrity that bothers me is the way these images are chosen for publication. The images and the prose with them tend to the narrative, the drumbeat of loss and badness without the context or the reason we were there to take the risk or any imagery that puts the soldier’s sacrifice into an understandable context. It’s always lists of names, photos, bloody images that fit the narrative.
September 6th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
[...] to add Jules Crittenden’s [...]
September 7th, 2009 at 12:06 am
[...] off, Jules Crittenden critiques the incident with a complex professional analysis of the practice of taking photos and [...]
September 7th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
The fact that the father objected should be it. There should have been no “discussions” about *that* picture. Period.
Julie Jacobson may have won the respect of the Marines she was embedded with. I am sure they liked her. But she betrayed them. And just you don’t do that in the real universe where these people live and die. For that there should be consequences.
“She says the grunts saw the casualty photos on her screen … all electronic, transmitted from laptop via sat phone these days … and were just curious, didn’t raise any objections.” Oh really? A bit self serving, that. Did they know they were going to be transmitted? Or did they think she just dumped her memory card and was storing all her photos on her hard drive (like everyone else does) while she sorted and worked on them?
Did she tell them she was sending the one of their dying comrade for likely distribution? Based on the milblogs I’ve read since, I hardly think so.
In this foul “narrative” driven, “speak truth to power” (and maybe get a Pulitzer to boot) media culture of today deceny, respect and morality seem to be given a lower value.
To disrespect the family — as well as the agreement with the Pentagon — for a sensationalized, albeit apparently not extraordinary picture — is indefensible.
I was wondering if the AP published the pictures of the Trade Center jumpers? Seems the MSM went into quick self censorhip on that — even with the jumpers not being identifiable.
Self disclosure: My son is heading back to Iraq for a second deployment — – his choice, as he felt he could do something more for the people of Iraq by helping them develop their military with a better model.
No photographer, newsservice or newspaper should make the mistake of disregarding our wishes should anything go wrong.