Readers of The Spokesman-Review were greeted by a poignant image on the front page of this newspaper for Tuesday, Feb. 26.
“Poignant and, yes, terrifying,” Carl Pfaff, Post Falls, wrote in a letter to the editor.
The large color picture showed a 4-year-old Palestinian boy with an AK-47 and a headband that read, when translated from Arabic, “Friends of Martyrs.”
A couple of other letter writers agreed with Pfaff that the image was a powerful way to convey the intensity of hatred felt in a volatile region.
A fourth letter writer, however, challenged the picture’s authenticity. It was “obviously staged for dramatic effect,” wrote Kathy Neary of Pullman.
In a follow-up interview by telephone, Neary told me she believes the photographer took the shot to reflect a slanted viewpoint.
“It presents a picture that all Palestinians, including children, are armed and dangerous,” she said.
Larry Reisnouer was representing the photo department at the afternoon meeting on Feb. 25 when decisions were being made about the next morning’s paper. He said he picked that picture because he considered it the most compelling that the wire had to offer that day. And the best local photos all were attached to stories that would not be on Page 1.
“What struck me about the photo was how scary it was, and how sad,” he said.
It was one of several photos available that day showing Palestinian children in what appeared to be training situations, all having to do with handling weapons, said Reisnouer.
“Just the idea that people would put kids into this set of circumstances, with automatic, high-powered weapons, teaching them to shoot them, and presumably telling them why and who they need to shoot, was very telling to me as to how hard-core the feelings of hate are in that area of the world.”
But letter-writer Neary isn’t the only person who found the picture suspicious. Veteran Spokesman-Review photographer Steve Thompson was also troubled.
“It just isn’t real,” said Thompson. The child, the rifle, the headband — for Thompson it was all too pat. He worries that readers who saw it would take it at face value and, as a result, be misled about what is happening in that area.
Cutlines beneath the picture said it was taken at a demonstration in Gaza to protest U.S. and Israeli policies. The cutlines referred readers to a short wire story on page A3 about a peace proposal from Saudi Arabia. There was no story about the demonstration.
In his letter, Pfaff said the photograph should win a Pulitzer prize. He spent time in the 1980s working with a relief agency for crippled children in Bethlehem. He remembers seeing children 4 and 5 throwing rocks at Israeli personnel.
“It’s a very short step from throwing stones to grabbing an AK-47,” he said.
But he doesn’t see the picture as slanted. He blames radicals on both sides of the conflict for instilling such deep hatred in children who grow up to be intractable adults.
Pfaff thinks the boy was probably put up to his actions by older male family members.
If so, does that constitute staging a picture?
Staged? No, insists Joel Jean-Pierre, an AP photo editor in New York. But posed? Probably.
In that area, he said, demonstrations for the media’s sake happen practically weekly — something that also happens on U.S. soil.
In this case the photo was represented as having been taken at a “demonstration,” a term that connotes a contrived set of events. Sometimes news is staged, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not news.
