July 27, 2008

Michael Kamber and Tim Arango filed a front-page story in The New York Times this weekend that should give every journalist a jolt. They described the swift and blanket retribution that the U.S. military brought to bear on a half dozen photographers who dared publish images of American war dead during this five-year fiasco.

While reading their in-depth investigation, I was reminded of the restrictions placed on combat photographers and their assigning publications during World War II up through the Gulf War and realized yet again how little the media consumer sees of palpable reality. If we are to believe the coverage of the current conflict, we are witnessing the damnedest war ever fought: a war without coffins; a war without battlefield casualties; a war fought on the cheap (in which our soldiers have lacked proper equipment and loved ones have had to raise funds to send flak-jackets) that has nonetheless escalated to $1 trillion; a war that has generated 4,000 military funerals – which the war’s commander-in-chief routinely declines to attend. We even have a stage-managed war zone purported to be “safe” by its new cheerleader, John McCain, even as he walks through an Iraqi bazaar surrounded by a cordon of armed attendants, a swarm of helicopters flying overhead. (For an extended essay on Iraq as “A War Waged in Images,” see pages 293-307 of Watching the World Change, a section that expands on an article I wrote for American Photo in 2003 and published online on The Digital Journalist Website.)

In our newspapers, on our websites, throughout our television broadcasts, death’s face is in the shadows, in the numbers, in between the lines. But in victims' nightmares and in soldiers’ gunsites and fever dreams – and in the memories’ viewfinders of every photojournalist who has covered this conflict – death stares back with a gaze as cold and steady as the moon’s.

...And while we're on the subject...please telescope back to March 2008 to read photographer Max Becherer’s chilling account of his five years in Iraq, published in the Times on the fifth anniversary of the start of the war.

...AND SPEAKING OF McCAIN and OBAMA check out these two satricial postings on VanityFair.com.