AP's Pulitzer
In response to the outcry over the AP's Pulitzer for a pack of Iraq photos, I dug up an old post from that other blog which can't have been written by me because my newspaper hates blogs and would fire anyone who so much as smiled at one. I distilled it down and posted it as a comment at Belmont Club, which was chewing up the AP last year over its photo coverage.
I looked through the AP's prize-winning package. Among the Iraq photos in the AP Pulitzer package, only this one seemed to do any honor to U.S. troops and their hard fight and intelligence. That one picture aside, it was a crooked panorama of the war, but it was typical of the AP's work during the year in Iraq.
In mid-August 2004, out of curiosity, I scrolled through the entire Yahoo! News "Iraq slideshow" and its 211 photos from AP, Reuters, and AFP.
Seventy-six of the photos, by far the largest block of them, showed "insurgents" in action. They run, they fire mortars, they pose with trophy American helmets (or else the same helmet passed around) and what are said to be captured American weapons. They flash the "V" for victory sign. They put AK-47s in the hands of their women and children and have them pose with a foot mounted on the brown U.S. helmet.
All three wire services ran more pictures of insurgents than of anything else from Iraq. The nature of the photos made it clear that the photographers were embedded in the insurgency. Embedding was criticized by media mavens when the U.S. military did it, because it implicitly aligned the reporters with the troops who protected them and the authorities who allowed it. But in this case, it is now Pulitzer-approved.
The number of pictures of U.S. soldiers and Marines in that day's photo round up was 14. That's less than one-fifth the coverage devoted to the insurgents. And what were they doing? No smiles, no triumphant poses, no "V for victory" signs flashing. No posing with relics of their enemies. In most of the photos, the U.S. troops stood around, looking bewildered, amid the carnage of some roadside bombing or mortar attack.
The pictures of U.S. vehicles, and many of those of the troops, are taken from a distance. As though the photographers were shooting from the other side.
There were 14 photos of living U.S. military men and women. There were five more pictures of dead ones -- including one photo of a montage that shows hundreds of faces of U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq.
There were 20 pictures of politicians -- more of politicians than of U.S. troops. Including two of Teresa Heinz-Kerry. What she had to do with Iraq escapes me.
The "Iraq slideshow" also had three pictures of beefed up security in European cities. This implied the Islamist threats against Europe were part of "Iraq." But the fact is the threats pre-existed the Iraq invasion.
Iraqi civilians? They were the subject of 13 photos out of 211 in the "Iraq slideshow." All of them show people wounded in insurgent attacks or caught in crossfire except one, which showed a small protest against the Baghdad government's decision to temporarily expell the Al Jazeera staff.
So Iraqis shown in the news that day were all either insurgents (the vast majority) or victims of violence. There were five dead U.S. soldiers to 14 live ones, and no dead insurgents. The grinning Shi'ite militias were flashing "victory," while the hapless U.S. forces stood stunned and watch their hardware burn.
Is that an accurate picture of the war that week? You be the judge: The actual body count during that week, based on the news stories from the same sources that produced this photo show, was more than 360 dead militiamen in Najaf alone. On our side, four dead Marines. It was the week the U.S. and its Iraqi allies broke the back of Sadr's grand rebellion. Another rout for the coalition.
I thought the "North County Times" had much better photo coverage of Iraq: gritty, gripping work from a smaller suburban newspaper. They got my Pulitzer.
I looked through the AP's prize-winning package. Among the Iraq photos in the AP Pulitzer package, only this one seemed to do any honor to U.S. troops and their hard fight and intelligence. That one picture aside, it was a crooked panorama of the war, but it was typical of the AP's work during the year in Iraq.
In mid-August 2004, out of curiosity, I scrolled through the entire Yahoo! News "Iraq slideshow" and its 211 photos from AP, Reuters, and AFP.
Seventy-six of the photos, by far the largest block of them, showed "insurgents" in action. They run, they fire mortars, they pose with trophy American helmets (or else the same helmet passed around) and what are said to be captured American weapons. They flash the "V" for victory sign. They put AK-47s in the hands of their women and children and have them pose with a foot mounted on the brown U.S. helmet.
All three wire services ran more pictures of insurgents than of anything else from Iraq. The nature of the photos made it clear that the photographers were embedded in the insurgency. Embedding was criticized by media mavens when the U.S. military did it, because it implicitly aligned the reporters with the troops who protected them and the authorities who allowed it. But in this case, it is now Pulitzer-approved.
The number of pictures of U.S. soldiers and Marines in that day's photo round up was 14. That's less than one-fifth the coverage devoted to the insurgents. And what were they doing? No smiles, no triumphant poses, no "V for victory" signs flashing. No posing with relics of their enemies. In most of the photos, the U.S. troops stood around, looking bewildered, amid the carnage of some roadside bombing or mortar attack.
The pictures of U.S. vehicles, and many of those of the troops, are taken from a distance. As though the photographers were shooting from the other side.
There were 14 photos of living U.S. military men and women. There were five more pictures of dead ones -- including one photo of a montage that shows hundreds of faces of U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq.
There were 20 pictures of politicians -- more of politicians than of U.S. troops. Including two of Teresa Heinz-Kerry. What she had to do with Iraq escapes me.
The "Iraq slideshow" also had three pictures of beefed up security in European cities. This implied the Islamist threats against Europe were part of "Iraq." But the fact is the threats pre-existed the Iraq invasion.
Iraqi civilians? They were the subject of 13 photos out of 211 in the "Iraq slideshow." All of them show people wounded in insurgent attacks or caught in crossfire except one, which showed a small protest against the Baghdad government's decision to temporarily expell the Al Jazeera staff.
So Iraqis shown in the news that day were all either insurgents (the vast majority) or victims of violence. There were five dead U.S. soldiers to 14 live ones, and no dead insurgents. The grinning Shi'ite militias were flashing "victory," while the hapless U.S. forces stood stunned and watch their hardware burn.
Is that an accurate picture of the war that week? You be the judge: The actual body count during that week, based on the news stories from the same sources that produced this photo show, was more than 360 dead militiamen in Najaf alone. On our side, four dead Marines. It was the week the U.S. and its Iraqi allies broke the back of Sadr's grand rebellion. Another rout for the coalition.
I thought the "North County Times" had much better photo coverage of Iraq: gritty, gripping work from a smaller suburban newspaper. They got my Pulitzer.
