ENGLISH CLASSES
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week_11_part_i_sum_14.pptx
Eng3239News Literacy
You may recall seeing some of these startling images that were in the news. Many find them etched in memory.
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After this lecture, students will be able to:
Explain how photos and recorded sound serve as powerful verification of journalist truth, aiding the news consumer’s search for reliable information.
Explain how the same photos and recorded sound can trigger strong emotional responses without adding to your understanding.
Use journalistic methods and questions to test the reliability of photos and recorded sound.
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A picture can be an essential tool in your intellectual search for reliable information.
The very same picture can arouse strong emotions that overwhelm your intellect.
Today, we think about the power of images to inform and to manipulate and how you as a news consumer can find reliable images and make sense of the visual culture in which we live.
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The Power of Images
Alerted by cell phone that there had been a plane crash downtown, AP photographer Richard Drew left a fashion week assignment in midtown Manhattan to race downtown, where he and rescue workers watched as the North Tower of the World Trade Center burned and people began jumping out of the building.
He took this photo at 9:41:15 a.m (according to digital image metadata )
The Associated Press, the world’s biggest news organization, supplies photos electronically and sent this one out shortly after it was taken. Around the world, newspaper staff began debating whether to use it or others like it.
This one is probably the most controversial of the thousands of digital photos taken on 9/11.
Have you seen this before? In photo classes? In ethics classes?
The subject of the image — whose identity remains uncertain, was one of hundreds of people trapped on the upper floors of the skyscraper who apparently chose to jump rather than die from the fire and smoke. In other photographs, by the way, it is evident that he is tumbling through the air, not serenely dropping.
The discussion starts with whether to use the photo at all, knowing it would offend the sensibilities of some readers and even potentially identify the jumpers. Would it amplify their families’ pain, or alert their communities to come to the aid and comfort of the grieving?
And if it was to be published, how to present it? Remember we talked about proportionality, about tone and weight…Does it belong on the front page or an inside page? Should it run large or small?
That was the debate in American newsrooms on September 11, 2001: did this image have the power to illustrate accurately the choices people faced in the Twin Towers that day? Or would it merely titillate and enrage?
How many would run the story describing people jumping?
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Two Questions About the Power of Images:
How is photo journalism different from words on a screen or page?
As a news consumer, what burden does that place on you when you are seeking reliable information?
Two questions frame our work today
How is photojournalism different?
What burden does that place on you as a seeker of reliable information?
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The Power of Images
If you were in charge, would you print a description of the bodies falling?
Would your print a photo?
Would you run video?
Why is each one different?
One paper decided to publish it the entire length of the page inside the paper. The New York Times ran it on page 7. Two thousand miles away, the Idaho Falls, Idaho newspaper published it as one of several images in a photo essay/photo page inside the paper.
Distant papers like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Memphis Commercial Appeal and The Denver Post were criticized for accused of exploiting the man’s death, stealing his dignity, turning tragedy into what sociologists call “the pornography of violence.” Those who advocated running the photo thought it captured the story by telling of the decisions that people had to make that day of whether to jump, fall or wait.
Australian theologian Mark Thompson (Moore Theological College, Sydney) calls it the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century.)
Journalistic judgment and ethical decisions are not limited to words, but to photos and video, as well.
Today, we think about the power of images to inform and to manipulate…and we begin looking at the work of photographers and videographers and their behind-the-scenes partners: photo editors and TV producers who judge, select and trim news photos and decide how to present them to you.
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Iconic News Photographs
American Soldiers, Iwo Jima, 1945
Our current fascination with each new Web tool or app obscures this fact: We are a culture in thrall to images, not words.
While the internet has passed radio and print as Americans’ source of news, it still trails television, that most visual of all news mediums. And even at that a great deal of what’s on the Internet is images.
You may recall this from the first-week about the Pew Center’s study: 78 percent of Americans watch local and national news, compared to 61 percent who rely on internet news outlets.
Visual journalism dominates newspapers and news magazines, too.
Researchers at the Poynter Institute, using eye-tracking technology, have repeatedly shown that the first place your eye goes on a page is the biggest photo.
Then the little caption that gives people’s names and other non-evident facts, then the eye moves on to next biggest photo, then the headlines, and last of all to the text of the article.
Adding even a tiny mugshot beside a story increases the number of readers by 30%.
And when newspaper readers’ memories are tested, they retained far more facts and figures if those data are presented in a graphic or chart than if presented in a paragraph of plain text.
A story without strong visual elements rarely if ever makes it on TV…so if TV is your only news source, what news might you be missing?
Let’s look at a few slides that drive home the power of images by reminding you how much of history you remember in pictures instead of words.
Take this slide: The AP’s Joe Rosenthal took this iconic photo in 1945 of the American flag being raised on the island of Iwo Jima during some of the fiercest fighting by American soldiers in World War II. This was Day 5 of a 35-day battle. This image was and still is a symbol of American determination and victory in World War II.
(There has always been some controversy because while Joe did not set up the photo, he did not think that he captured the image on film so he asked the soldiers to recreate the scene. However, the original photo was the one that was published, not the recreated photo.)
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Holocaust Survivors
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One of the moist memorable pictures taken of Holocaust victims.
Civil Rights Protest in Birmingham, Bill Hudson, 1963
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James Meredith’s Welcome to Mississippi by Jack Thornell, Associated Press, 1966
Civil rights demonstrator attacked by a police dog on May 3, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama.
Images like this helped the rest of the country and the world see what was happening in the South.
Kent State University, John Filo, 1970
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Kent State University (Four Students Killed by National Guard Bullets), by John Filo, 1970
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Anti-Vietnam war sentiment was very strong across the United States in 1970. At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen opened fire on demonstrating students and killed four students. Here Mary Ann Vecchio, 14, leans over the body of Jeffrey Miller and screams in horror.
The photographer was John Filo, a journalism student at Kent State. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this shot.
The Space Shuttle Challenger Explodes, 1986
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The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew member off the coast of central Florida. Many viewed the launch live due to the presence on the crew of Christa McAuliffe, first member of the Teacher in Space project. One study reported that 85 percent of Americans surveyed had heard the news within an hour of the accident.
Tiananmen Square Standoff, Stuart Franklin, 1989
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Tiananmen Square Standoff by Stuart Franklin, 1989
A democracy movement was building in Beijing in 1989 and thousands of young people had camped in Tiananmen Square opposite the Forbidden City. After several days of protests, the Chinese government moved in soldiers and tanks to crush the gathering. Estimates are that up to 800 people were killed.
This photo from the roof of a nearby hotel, shows one lone Chinese man stopping a line of tanks heading for the square. The photo was published all over the world as a sign of how a single person can make a difference. No one knows what happened to the man. The photo is still very controversial in China and has never been published there.
Tiananmen 'Tank Man' photo was made available on Google China in January 2010 when Google was protesting cyber spy attacks and web censorship.
That was the first time the photo had been available on the web in China.
China blocks Web content it deems politically objectionable in a vast censorship system dubbed the "Great Firewall of China."
Abu Ghraib Prison, 2003
This photograph of an Iraqi prisoner being held captive by the US Military at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq was one of dozens to surface in the spring of 2004 when CBS News’ 60 Minutes II broadcast a report on the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war. Images such as this ignited a firestorm of outrage around the world and fueled anti- war sentiment in the United States.
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Hurricane Katrina, 2005
Images like these from New Orleans, broadcast and published at the same time U.S. officials were saying all was going well after Hurricane Katrina, galvanized an outpouring of private donations for rescue and recovery.
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The Obama Fist Bump, 2009
Taking the stage to accept his party’s nomination for President, Barack Obama fist-bumps his wife.
On the June 6 edition of Fox News' America's Pulse, host E.D. Hill introduced an upcoming discussion by saying "A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently."
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Pelican, Gulf of Mexico, 2010
Sometimes, despite all of our expertise, a picture is the best evidence of a disaster, not statistics.
The Audubon Society asked scientists to try to understand what proportion of the actual death toll the collected birds represented in the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
For the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, they estimated that the collected dead birds represented somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of the actual number of birds killed. If those numbers held true for the Deepwater Horizon, the estimate would be somewhere between 7,000 and 23,000 birds killed.
But who remembered that? Who could forget this picture, though.
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Time Magazine, July 29, 2010
Time wrote: “Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival. “
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2011’s Arab Spring – Tahrir Square Protests in Cairo
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Which of these photos of the capture, killing and public display of former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi will be the iconic image of October, 2011?
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Khalid Mohammed, a photographer for the Associated Press, took a picture 10 years ago of two charred American bodies hanging from a bridge and surrounded by a crowd of cheering Iraqis. His was far from the only photograph depicting the killing and mutilation of four civilian contractors on the streets of Fallujah on March 31, 2004, and the attack, while horrific, was far from the most militarily important event of the then one-year-old war.
But this one was probably the most memorable one.
At this point, the number of Americans dead in Iraq was nearing 600, including five killed the same day as the contractors in a separate incident. But the power of Mohammed’s image and others like it—each a presentation of a visual spectacle invented by a mob—drove coverage of the attack, making it one of the most significant events of the war.
The horror of the image is multilayered, dawning rather than immediate. The composition draws the viewer to the smiling face of a young Iraqi man in the foreground, his arm raised in celebration.
A viewer following the limb up to the outstretched fingertips sees a gruesome and at first unidentifiable black shape framed between the slant of his wrist and the bridge’s pale green girder. On the left side, there is a matching black shape, and this one is shockingly human, suspended upside down, with clearly defined legs splayed above the jubilant crowd, and a head and torso not quite obscured by a living, cheering index finger pointed skyward.
From a caption, the viewer learns that the bodies are those of US contractors ambushed by insurgents and left to be mutilated and dragged through the streets to the bridge. The image draws its power from the contrast of celebration amid horror, American bodies amid the Iraqi people and landscape, burnt and missing limbs amid intact and outstretched ones. The photograph begins in mystery, which then becomes horror, which then turns again to mystery. How could anyone celebrate this? How did this happen to American civilians? What are the people in the photo, who posed the bodies and gathered beneath them, trying to communicate to us?
The photograph draws power from its contrast with the official narrative of the war at the time. When the image reached millions of viewers around the world, it had been almost a year since US troops seized Baghdad and helped Iraqi civilians tear down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. And it was coming up on a year since President Bush was photographed on the aircraft carrier with the “Mission Accomplished” banner in the background. There was a growing wariness in the media and among the public that the war was turning into something more complicated than a limited engagement, but a new narrative, with attendant imagery, had yet to take hold. Press briefings maintained that Americans were being greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people, a view Mohammed’s photograph challenged succinctly, albeit implicitly, and brashly, albeit silently.
Mohammed’s photo told a different story, and did so in a single frame. It opened a new front in the war of public opinion for the Bush administration. For a time, it became the new face of the war and influenced not only the way the war was discussed but the way it was fought.
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Shocking images can tell a story without any words.
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But not all memorable photos focus on death and mayhem. Here is a photo captured the mood of a nation at the end of the second world war, and remains a cultural totem. It was taken by the award-winning Alfred Eisenstaedt, and his caption read: A sailor kisses a nurse in New York’s Times Square in celebration of the Japanese surrender on August 14, 1945
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News Photos Tell a Story…
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Except when they don’t
Here’s the photo of Bin Laden, dead.
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In his house where he was killed by U.S. Navy Seals in a commando attack.
In other words there was no photo of the killing released by the U.S. government.
Why did the White House release this photo?
…but none of the images from the raid on Bin Laden’s compound?
The White House “Situation Room” May 2, 2011, President and staff watch real-time feed during raid on Bin Laden.
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But this photo was released by the White House. It shows President Obama and other topo government officials watching the raid take place in real time. In other words, there were many pictures available to be released, but they were not.
The Ethics of Photojournalism
Graphic Photos Prompt Difficult Decisions
Telling people what’s going on
Vs.
Disturbing
Gratuitous
Exploitation
We have discussed the process by which editors decide what to publish or broadcast: interest vs. importance…News Drivers….Market vs. Mission
Behind it is the journalism ethic—inform the public of what’s going on.
Some photos make carrying out that ethical duty harder than others.
Many people don’t want their children to see harsh photos, and there is a hidden meaning there that they don’t want to see them, either—the pictures are too disturbing.
There are those who say shocking photos are often gratuitous, add no real meaning to a story, are just used for exploitation
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Some of the Following Images are Disturbing
Warning:
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Drowning Victim Edward Romera’s Family, John Harte, 1986
In 1986, the editors of the Bakersfield Californian, an 80,000-circulation newspaper ran this photo on an inside page and received 500 letters, 400 phone calls, 80 subscription cancellations, and one bomb threat. It shows a family’s grief upon seeing 5-year-old Edward Romera in a body bag at a lake where he drowned.
Photographer John Harte said he ducked the outstretched arms and objections of a deputy to snap it from about 5 feet away. The managing editor, Robert Bentley, ran the picture on an inside page. Another young boy had drowned on the same day. The swimming area was dangerous spot and the photo would be hard to ignore.
But in response to the storm, the editor apologized and declared its publicatioin a mistake.
Even so, not all readers objected. As one letter said, “…my own 2 1/2-year-old son drowned. . . . If maybe just one parent saw that picture of the grieving family and drowning victim and has taken more precautions around pool and beach areas because of it, then that picture may have saved another child's life.”
A subsequent report said in the 2 months prior to the boy's death, 14 people had drowned. In the month following the controversy, 2 drowned.
“The newspaper and the photographer had to take the wrath of an angry readership who either did not want to be faced with a real tragedy of life or they sincerely were concerned about the rights to privacy for the Romero family. Whatever the rationale, lives were probably saved by the newspaper's coverage.”-PhotoJournalism: An ethical approach, by Paul Martin Lester, 1999.
The financial impact on the paper was small: One tenth of one per cent of the circulation was canceled
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American Soldier
Mogadishu, Somalia
Paul Watson, 1993
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In 1993, a dead American solider was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Public opinion swiftly turned against the peace-keeping mission there and President Clinton cancelled the mission and US troops quickly withdrew from Somalia.
Here is a photo that influenced public opinion and policy, offended sensibilities and normal standards (showing graphic violence or dead bodies).
Did soldier’s parents know of his death at the time – or were they learning about on the nightly news? To what extent should journalists care about these issues?
The standard rule is that news outlets do not to release names or photos until the military has notified next of kin.
Oklahoma City Fireman with Child,
Charles H. Porter IV, 1995
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Oklahoma City Fireman and Child by Charles H. Porter IV, 1995
In1995 the Oklahoma City Federal Building was bombed. Some 168 were killed and many more injured.
Most papers published this photo of an Oklahoma City fireman carrying a badly injured baby.
Even though newspaper policy often is not to publish photos of dead people, the newspaper determined that when the photo was taken, the baby was alive. The child later died.
It was published on Page One.
Vietnamese Children Fleeing Napalm Strike, Nick Ut, 1972
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Children Fleeing an American Napalm Strike, Nick Ut, 1972
The Vietnam war produced thousands of strong and graphic images.
This picture taken June 8, 1972 by AP photographer Nick Ut shows children running in horror from US napalm bombs.
The controversy about this image was the fact that the young girl, 9-year-old Kim Phuc (“Fook”) is naked, clothes apparently burned off.
(Years later the girl and the photographer met and have remained friends until this day. They did a book together. She feels that the photo did a great deal to show the tragedy of war.)
Sudan, Kevin Carter, 1993
Photographer Kevin Carter was covering the famine in the Sudan in 1993 when he saw this child crawling toward a feeding station. In the background is a vulture.
He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away . However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the little girl:
The St. Petersburg Times in Florida said this of Carter: "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown.
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Kevin Carter commits suicide 15 months later
On 27 July 1994 , about three months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for photography, Carter drove to an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of CO poisoning at the age of 33. According to Time Magazine, portions of Carter's suicide note read:
"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners..."
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A Bosnian Rape Victim’s Suicide
1990s
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This photo of a rape victim’s suicide ran with accounts of atrocities in Bosnia. This, and the stories of rape being used as a weapon in the civil war, contributed to the public pressure for America to intercede.
Take a close look. Peaceful, bucolic scene. Not sure what’s happening. Then the caption reveals what happened.
