Flag-draped caskets arrive from Iraq and Afghanistan every week -- mostly out of public sight. While the Bush administration banned photographs of the arrival ceremonies,
the Obama administration is now considering lifting the ban.
This raises several important questions for journalists: What should our response be if the ban is lifted? How would we explain the importance of the photographs to the public? How will we buffer the inevitable charges of voyeurism and even, I am sure, anti-patriotism?
I interviewed Poynter's Ethics Group Leader
Kelly McBride and Poynter's Visual Journalism Group Leader
Kenny Irby on Tuesday about how to ethically cover these kinds of situations.
If you're receiving this via e-mail newsletter and have trouble viewing the video, please use the video player on the Morning Meeting page.Roy Peter Clark, Poynter's vice president and senior scholar, said these battles over whether images of the war dead should be made public is an old one. Listen to the fight over such images in World War I.
If you're receiving this via e-mail newsletter and have trouble viewing the video, please use the video player on the Morning Meeting page.Clark said the stories of individual soldiers can be even more compelling than the stories of hundreds, or even thousands, of nameless dead. In the video below, he is reading from a June 27, 1969, edition of
Life Magazine.
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The Washington Post reports:
"Showing these pictures would remind people of the war," said S. Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. But he added that "what turns people against a war is not knowledge that Americans are dying but the belief that they are not dying for something" worthwhile.
A majority of Americans favor allowing the public to see pictures of the military honor guard receiving the war dead at Dover, with about 60 percent responding positively and a third answering negatively in polls posing the question in 1991 and 2004.
Some families of fallen troops also support allowing the news media to photograph and videotape the ceremony, or at least letting the families decide whether to permit it rather than continuing the government ban.
"I would have loved to see them fly my son back in and give him a full salute," said Janice Chance of Owings Mills, Md., whose son, Marine Capt. Jesse Melton III, was killed Sept. 9 in Afghanistan's Parwan province. She said she is in favor of media coverage of the return ceremony.
McBride said journalists have to consider the cumulative effect of repeatedly running casket photos. The public, she said, evaluates us on individual decisions and on our news judgment as it takes shape over time.
If you're receiving this via e-mail newsletter and have trouble viewing the video, please use the video player on the Morning Meeting page.Here are a handful of casket photos released after professor Ralph Begleiter, a former CNN correspondent, filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
Some of those images include black bars over the faces of soldiers, and even clergy.
In 2004,
Tami Silicio, a military contractor in Kuwait, lost her job for giving
The Seattle Times a photo of military caskets being flown home from Iraq.
A Web site called The Memory Hole has published several photographs of caskets arriving from Iraq to Dover's Air Force Base in Delaware.
Read Irby's story of how Silicio's photo and others came into the public light, and watch the video below for more insight.
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The big blowup that was the beginning of the end of open casket arrival ceremonies has been called "The Dover Incident." On Dec. 21, 1989, the U.S. had just invaded Panama, and the first U.S. military casualties were returned to Dover Air Force Base. At the same moment the TV networks were broadcasting the images of that grim arrival, President George H.W. Bush held his first news conference since the invasion. He appeared to be joking, evening laughing, at the very moments the caskets were arriving. ABC, CBS and CNN showed the strikingly different images -- the joking president and the caskets on split-screen, live. The practice of allowing coverage of arriving caskets stopped right away.
The Dover Incident is just one of many times that the government has opened the coffin ceremonies to the public when the publicity suits the government's purposes of stirring emotions or drumming up support for a war effort. For example, the
National Security Archive lists these exceptions to the ban:
- 1980: President Carter was photographed at Arlington praying over flag-draped coffins bearing the remains of the eight U.S. airmen killed in the aborted rescue of the Tehran Embassy hostages.
- 1983: President Reagan was present at Andrews AFB for a ceremony for American diplomatic and military personnel killed in the April bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. He was photographed in front of a row of flag-draped coffins bearing the remains of military and diplomatic personnel. Within a few days of the ceremony photographs were provided to the media by the White House.
- 1985: President Reagan attended a ceremony at Andrews AFB for military personnel killed in El Salvador, pinning purple hearts on their flag-draped caskets. The event was covered by the media.
- 1989: The media covered ceremonies at Norfolk, Virginia for 47 U.S. sailors killed in an accidental explosion aboard the battleship U.S.S. Iowa.
Some journalists will undoubtedly turn the photos into multimedia presentations. Irby and McBride said journalists should be especially cautious when using music or production techniques that may heighten emotions.
If you're receiving this via e-mail newsletter and have trouble viewing the video, please use the video player on the Morning Meeting page.Clark said to make sure photos or videos of soldiers' caskets do not stand alone. It always helps, he said, to find the deeper story behind them.
If you're receiving this via e-mail newsletter and have trouble viewing the video, please use the video player on the Morning Meeting page.The National Press Photographers Association provides additional information on this topic.
The NewsHour on PBS shows photos of the dead, in...
