Unforgettable images:
One photo from the Vietnam War shows a young girl, burned by napalm, running toward the camera’s eye, her pain
reflected in her twisted face. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
Another Vietnam-era picture, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, documents a Viet Cong officer being summarily executed by
a South Vietnamese officer.
Photos show President Kennedy’s motorcade speeding away from Dealey Plaza, rushing the mortally wounded chief
executive to the emergency room.
Images by Pulitzer winner Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times-Herald freeze the murder of Lee Oswald by Jack
Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police station.
Heartbreaking shots reveal people plummeting from the top floors of the World Trade Center towers to their deaths on
the pavement below.
All are terrible images that tell important stories.
Newspaper editors make decisions about running such depictions all the time. Readers do not always agree. Such is the
case with The Salt Lake Tribune’s decisions to run 9-11 images of bodies plunging since the attack on America. On Sept.
12, 2001, The Tribune published one shot that showed bodies falling next to the towers. On Sept. 11, 2002, a similar
image ran in a grouping of photos inside the 20-page special section commemorating the attacks. On Sept. 4, 2001, a
story by USA Today, sans the photo, that disclosed about 200 people plunged to their deaths from the WTC towers was
published on the front page of The Tribune. That story disturbed some readers also.
Utahn Debra Wright sent an e-mail that read in part: “I cannot believe that you actually had the audacity to print a
picture of someone falling to their death from the World Trade Center. Do you not realize that children will see that? Do
you not realize that adults will see that? It is horrifying in the extreme for anyone to ever see that picture, especially the
family of that poor man.”
And reader John Egbert sent an e-mail that pointed to the sometimes conflicting nature of a newspaper’s role: “It
appears that the Tribune is exhibiting a double standard today [09/11/2002]. First, a front-page article is run exhorting
readers to turn off the TV and ease the 9/11 trauma, while inside the paper a photo is displayed of a businessman jumping
off of the World Trade Center. Perhaps television stations should inform their viewers to pick up their newspapers
straight from the front porch and throw them away without reading as a way to ease the 9/11 trauma.”
The Deseret News chose not to publish any of the photographs of people jumping from the towers. News Editor John
Hughes explained they did not want to offend readers. “What is gruesome? Do you run shots of mangled bodies — no. .
. . your conscience and own sense of taste dictate what is recorded in print . . . we were not concealing from our readers
that aspect of the tragedy . . . We felt there was not any need to run photos of falling bodies. We’ll always shy away from
the really gruesome.”
That’s one way to look at the question, but certainly not the only one.
Do not believe that newspaper reporters, editors and photographers are immune to the nature of what they report. Many
a story of a great tragedy has been covered by news people who sniffed and wiped their leaking eyes through the whole
process.
But a newspaper at its best must be willing to look unflinchingly at what takes place in the human arena.
Formerly a photojournalist and a war photographer and now a professor at the University of Utah Department of
Communication, Jim Fisher says of the horrifying photographs: “Being aware of the truth of the day’s events sometimes
takes extra effort — not to search for it but to face it.”
Cutting to the heart of the readers’ concerns, Fisher says: “Seeing is sometimes hard. Truth in pictures is almost always
sudden, visceral, emotional. But it is that kind of hard truth that matters to us most, as individuals who were not present at
the event and as members of a nation who could only imagine the scope of the horror. Unforgettable news pictures show
readers the truth of what happened, and they also depend on readers to react to their message.
“There are thousands of words reporting what happened in the towers a year ago, but none really gets to the same
realization of personal horror as the pictures of trapped people choosing their own fate. . . . What confuses some is the
horror of being placed in that awful situation where death is sure, method is the only variable.”
Tribune Managing Editor Tim Fitzpatrick summarized management’s decision: “Photos like that do challenge the limits
of propriety, and we don’t take the decision to run them lightly. Ultimately, the picture was one of the most powerful
statements on the true horror of Sept. 11. We could not accurately portray a key moment in history if we shied away from
that horror.”
Tribune Assistant Managing Editor for Graphics Chris Magerl notes: “Too many people saw endless video of planes
and and buildings and clouds of smoke, but the story wasn’t about buildings and smoke. It was about people dying
terrible deaths. An image of a person who is obviously moments from death makes that point with undeniable power. To
suggest that such deaths should not be seen is to truly have those deaths be in vain.”
Amen.
The seemingly schizophrenic decision to run the story about keeping children away from the TV coverage and also to
run the photo inside Wednesday’s edition is a bit easier to explain. Part of a newspaper’s charge is to offer information
that helps readers interpret and deal with the world around them.
The story offered valuable information to parents. The stark and unforgettable photograph served as a reminder — and
a memorial — of those who suffered most horribly in the attack.
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The Reader Advocate’s phone number is 801-257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O.
Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. E-mail: reader.advocate@sltrib.com.
