RSS
Home
Photographer Julie Jacobson and a dead Marine named Joshua Bernard: to publish or not to publish?
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Julie Jacobson, center, in Afghanistan AP photo/Julie Jacobson
The web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense [sic] furiously tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn’t, to its everlasting credit.
Thus begins a column by Fred Reed, a former Marine Lance Corporal of 21 years, who was also shot, and was blinded as a result.
The NY Times, who published the offending photo, also published part of the letter Gates sent to AP president Tom Curley:
Why your organization would purposefully defy the family’s wishes knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right — but judgment and common decency.
Here is part of Reed's response:
But Gates. The words “decency” and “unconscionable” coming from him are fetid with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. “Intelligence” agencies are moral dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, STASI, SAVAK—they’re all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of decency. He has none.
Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead kid or for his family. If you don’t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don’t send them there. He does. How sorry can he be?
...
Why then is he so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control … Photographs are death to a war, boys and girls. They can asphyxiate a war faster than roadside bombs can even dream. Gates does not want the sprawling somnolent inattentive beast, the public, to see what his wars really are.
...
Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers refuse to show the charred bodies still…slowly…moving, the dead children, the…never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children.
If you have the courage to read the rest of Fred Reed's column – and, yes, he posted the photograph in question – you may not like it. You may not like Fred Reed, and you may be offended by the language he uses.
But to this Christian, his language is a rare form of music to the ears. Fred Reed speaks the truth, unlike the Pentagon or Washington … or even many Christians.
These are the things which you should do:
speak the truth to one another;
judge with truth and judgment
for peace in your gates.
(Zechariah 8:16)
Related Articles:
Comments
.jpg)
