Reader reaction to our coverage of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death began almost 12 hours before Friday’s paper started rolling off the presses.
A man called on Thursday, having just heard the news that a U.S. airstrike had killed the al-Qaida in Iraq leader, and threatened to cancel his subscription if the story wasn’t at the top of Page One the next day. While I’m happy that his subscription is intact, our editors didn’t need that threat to select the event that would be the obvious big play of the day here and in practically every other newspaper in the country.
But after the paper actually hit the streets, I got a lot more calls about another issue: the front-page photo of the dead al-Zarqawi. The photo ran six columns, showing a soldier at a news conference walking away with a framed photo of al-Zarqawi with a machine gun, having replaced it with a framed photo of the terrorist leader’s bloated face, lying in a pool of blood.
More than a dozen readers called or e-mailed to register their disgust with the photo choice.
“I am absolutely appalled,” wrote Bernidean Strong of Maple Heights. “I would expect those tactics from the enemy but not from us. I realize there are those who relish . . . the death of this horrible man and would want to see his lifeless body. Could you not have placed the photos on an inside page and warned those who did not want to witness it?”
“When my 7-year-old son asked me if that man was sleeping, I just said yes and changed the subject,” said Kate Hoegner of Lakewood. “I don’t think he’s ready to hear about the horrors of the world yet.”
I left the office before the front-page photo choice was made and thus was just as unprepared as any of you were when I picked up my morning paper. And I have to admit that I blanched a bit myself. It was certainly not out of any compassion for the dead hoodlum, but we aren’t accustomed to seeing death stare back at us in such a brutal way from our morning newspaper. It reminded me of the photos I used to see as a kid in the New York tabloids of machine-gunned gangsters lying in barbershops and restaurants during the Mafia turf wars. And I thought also — haven’t we gotten beyond that?
We had, but the rules of what is acceptable family newspaper and prime-time television fare seem to be relaxing as we go further into the age of suicide bombers and indiscriminate mayhem.
When Saddam Hussein’s two murderous sons were killed in 2003, early in the Iraq war, their bullet-riddled bodies were prominently displayed in the Middle East media and in U.S. newspapers including this one. The Defense Department released those gruesome photos because the Iraqi populace lived in such profound fear of those two men that people refused to believe they were dead. The photos were proof.
I suppose that’s the same argument for the prominent display of the al-Zarqawi photos. But just because we have those photos doesn’t mean we have to put them on the front page, right?
Right, but Editor Doug Clifton thought it was the obvious Page One choice.
“The photo was neither offensive nor shocking and the event was enormously significant, so running it was well within the bounds of propriety and good news judgment,” he said.
The choice was the same one that almost every large U.S. newspaper made for its Friday front page.
Notable exceptions were the Miami Herald and the Dallas Morning News, which were more interested in the first game of the NBA Finals between the Dallas Mavericks and the Miami Heat. (Across Europe, Asia and South America, al-Zarqawi similarly took a back seat to a little tourney called the World Cup that started Friday.)
Another exception was Detroit, the city with the most concentrated Arab population in the country, where neither the News nor the Free Press played that photo on the front. And in Ohio, The Plain Dealer was the only large paper to run it on Page One. Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Akron all found other ways of telling the story.
The editor who made the decision here is Assistant Managing Editor Daryl Kannberg.
“It wasn’t a particularly easy picture to look at, and I don’t like to show dead people on the front page,” he said. “But in this case, I felt there was a significant news value in using it. I thought it was a compelling picture, and I particularly liked the symbolism of the soldier replacing the picture of the living al-Zarqawi with the one of him dead.”
It might be more than coincidence that all of the objections I received were from women. While I am not famous for being in touch with my feminine side, I could relate to their objections.
Marta Patete of Lyndhurst, for one, pleaded with the paper not to run such a photo again.
“I think we all are pretty desensitized by the media, but this one hit me pretty hard,” she said. “I avoid looking at photos like that, because I don’t want to become that desensitized. You lose your compassion, you lose your feeling for people, it sears your emotions and your empathy.”
Some people will snort at that and say that it was nothing more than a photo of a dead thug. But I know what she means.
