The New York Times has a front-page article today by Michael Kamber and Tim Arango about the increasing difficulty photojournalists are having with an American military that is attempting to control graphic images from the war in Iraq. One of the photojournalists featured in the Times’ article is Zoriah Miller, who was recently interviewed on Democracy Now! after he was barred from the Marine Corps for publishing graphic photos showing Marines killed in a suicide attack last month. In the Times’ article, Miller says:
“The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing — which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working.”
The Times’ article says that “searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers,” and, by a recent count, only a handful of Western photographers are covering the war today.
One is forced to wonder, as Miller implies above, if the public saw more of these photos — which in reality show the true nature of war and the consequences of violence — would there be the same amount of passivity regarding the ongoing unpopular war?
Very Late Update: The New York Times’ Public Editor weighs in on the details of the Times’ decisions to publish war photographs.
Notes and Beats 