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Dear Kathleen,

This Progression Three essay was the most challenging one so far. Writing a full research

essay demanded a lot of time looking up articles and brainstorming ideas. I felt like the process

helped in developing my ideas, especially the library visit. Once again, the exploratory draft and

formal drafts were helpful, as were the conferences.

I came across the idea to write about censorship just by browsing the articles during the

library visit. I was shocked by the headline and picture, so I thought it would be an interesting

topic and exhibit to explore. However, it took a while for me to develop my complete argument,

and I only really developed an answer to my research questions after two weeks of reading

through many articles online and in scholarly journals. Once again, my process of outlining my

argument was very helpful.

The major challenge I faced was having too much content from too many sources, so that

the focus on my exhibit is lost. So this time, I tried to pay even more attention to making my

sources interact with one another, and all relate to my main exhibit. I sharpened up my

transitions, and made my prose more reader-based. I streamlined my argument, cutting out

extraneous details, sources, and tangents. By this final draft, I feel like my argument is refined

and coherent. For the Progression Four prompt, I will try to work on making my essay even more

concise and readable.

Enjoy the following essay!

James Xue

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James Xue

Kathleen Ross

University Writing

2 December 2013

Propaganda, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: What Should Be Published?

On December 3, 2012, at about 1:30 PM, a man was shoved onto the tracks at the 49th

Street Station in New York City, where he was shortly afterwards crushed “like a rag doll” by

the oncoming downtown Q train (Conley 1). While many of the onlookers were criticized for not

reacting and saving Ki Suk Han, 58 years old and father of one, one person at the scene received

the most outrage: R. Umar Abbasi, a New York Post freelance photographer who later claimed

on The Daily Show that he “did everything that he could do” by firing off his flash in a desperate

attempt to get the driver to slow down. (1). “If this thing happened again with the same

circumstances, whether I had a camera or not, and I was running toward him, there was no way I

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could have rescued Mr. Han,” Mr. Abbasi defended. The next day, the New York Post ran the

article with the gruesome picture on the cover, and was met with even stronger criticism. Jeff

Sonderman, a fellow at journalism think tank Poynter Institute, attacked the New York Post,

saying “Even if you accept that the photographer and other bystanders did everything they could

to try to save the man, it’s a separate question of what the Post should have done with that

photo” (1). The controversy over the chilling image even extended into social media, with one

user tweeting that “NY Post should be ashamed of its misuse of humanity for its cover photo of a

man about to be killed by a subway train. When does cruelty end?” (1).

This recent event provides a look into one of the most pressing issues in today’s media:

What is morally and ethically right to publish? In this essay, I will use this New York Post article

as a lens to examine censorship in photojournalism. I will look at different cases of censorship,

especially historical analyses of how war has led to censorship and propaganda in different time

periods such as the Spanish Civil War, the Gulf War, and even the recent Iraq War. Using these

examples, I will compare the decisions made in war photography to the decisions made by

photographers and publishers in media today.

Many questions arise from this tragic event, but the most important question is this: was

it right for the New York Post to run the image as the cover photo? This was the prevailing cause

for outrage among the media and the public. Why did people react so strongly, in a negative

way? How, and in what ways did this kind of anti-censorship cross the line?

To approach these questions, one must answer: what defines “honest” or “legitimate”

photojournalism? To answer this, let us examine how photography has been censored throughout

history in wartime situations. For example, the Persian Gulf War, codenamed “Desert Storm”, in

1991 was touted as a war “the public could witness firsthand”, but ironically, became “one of the

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most effectively censored and controlled media events in modern history” (Griffin 817). Michael

Griffin and Jongsoo Lee performed an analysis on all 1,104 Gulf-War related pictures published

by Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report during “Desert Storm”. What they found

was astonishing. “For every picture of actual combat (3% of the total), the newsmagazines

printed about nine noncombat photographs of American military hardware” (817). Foregoing

images of real warfare, these media outlets instead chose to broadcast images of American

military technology and power. The study continues: “Only 27 of 1,104 pictures (or 2% of the

total) show any signs of wounded or killed American soldiers” (819). Very little of the

photojournalistic coverage in these newspapers and magazines showed actual combat in any

form, especially in light of the claims made by newspapers about their comprehensive, on-the-

front-lines coverage. The photographic portrayal of the war “seems to promote American

military and technological superiority as a central theme”, and “neglects several important

aspects of the war, particularly those involving the human cost of the conflict” (821). In other

words, The US News magazines chose to portray the war as a “clean war.”

Why did the magazines choose to do this? Susan Sontag, author of the essay "Looking at

War: Photography's View of Devastation and Death”, explains the media’s motives for

displaying the war as a “clean war”. Images, much more than words, have a huge influence on

our thinking and our memory. Sontag explains, “Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the

consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and

reinfusion of snippets of footage about the conflict.” (Sontag 87). In other words, the image

people retain about an event like a war, taking place miles away from home, is completely

determined by the images produced from media outlets like magazines and newspapers. “In an

era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something

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and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim, or

proverb” (87). If what Sontag says is true, then the Gulf War study becomes even more

significant; the prevalence of military hardware photos over real warfare photos gives the

American public an even more skewed perspective of the war.

If photographs have so much power to control our thinking, naturally the media would try

to use images to generate a positive response to the war, even if the images are not truthful. In

her book War and Photography: A Cultural History, Caroline Brothers argues:

Despite their aura of fortuitous objectivity, photographs are always cast in specific and deliberate terms. In the case of propagandist images – photographs expressly designed to persuade – these terms are the more clearly because more urgently pronounced. Inflected and adapted to ensure maximum persuasive effect, they speak directly to the cultural concerns of the society at which they are directed, both in the subjects chosen for representation and in the way those subjects are portrayed” (Brothers 2).

Brothers’ language in this passage convinces the reader that the meaning and interpretations of

photographs largely depend on the cultural context in which they are received. Her diction in

words like “fortuitous objectivity”, “propagandist”, and “persuasive” create a skeptical tone to

show that photographs do not simply convey information about objective reality, but also reflect

the beliefs and political attitudes of their culture. Brothers uses the Spanish Civil War as a

historical example, as it was the first war to be freely and extensively photographed for the

public, and established war photography. However, the images were used as weapons for

propaganda, because public opinion drove decisions of whether to intervene in Spain or not.

“Photographs played an important role in generating these alternative “truths” which they

represented with the authority of fact” (11).

Similarly, in the 1988 collection of essays The Burden of Representation, John Tagg

argues that there is a close relationship between photography and historical period. Tagg

proclaims that photography’s “status as a technology varies with the power relations that invest

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it. Its nature as a practice depends upon the institutions and agents that define it and set it to

work” (Tagg 63). In other words, the impact of photographs depends not only on the social and

cultural context of the media, but the political context in government as well. Photographs, like

Brothers says, are objective, and reflect the needs and desires of those who can control their

context; often times, that means some form of censorship by political leaders, military generals,

or other governmental institutions.

Susan Sontag agrees that there are, in fact, many uses of photography. After all, “an

image produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before the lens.” (Sontag

87). Naturally, with the persuasive power that a photograph has, governments and the media in

positions of power would manipulate photos to their advantage, and along with it, the emotions

and memory of its citizens. The same photograph can show two different things; photographs

can be manipulated to convey different messages for different purposes. “Photographs of an

atrocity may give rise to opposing responses: a call for peace; a cry for revenge; or simply the

bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things

happen” (86). Sontag goes on to say:

Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. [Virginia] Woolf believes that not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage, is a failure of imagination, of empathy. But surely the photographs could just as well foster greater militancy on behalf of the Republic. Isn’t this what they were meant to do?” (83).

In fact, a militarization of political life during war can be extremely effective, if immoral. Images

can be highly persuasive and manipulative. As we have seen, governments have employed

effective strategies in different situations to secure the flow of images.

How does this relate to the New York Post article? When it comes down to it, the decision

to censor a horrifying photo of war is very similar to the New York Post’s decision to run its

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photo of a horrifying accident. As Brothers and Tagg have argued, the decision whether or not to

censor the photo depends on the cultural context of society. So what exactly is the cultural

context today?

The defining attitude of media and communications today, especially regarding wartime

photography and images the public sees, stems from 9/11 and the 2003 Iraq War. The success of

the Iraq War, like the Gulf War, depended on the ability of the government to win public support

for the war. One example of how 9/11 shaped public opinion is the photographic exhibition After

September 11: Images from Ground Zero, made up of 27 images by American photographer Joel

Meyerowitz, in February 2002. Charlotte Beers, sworn in by President Bush as Under Secretary

of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, stated the motives behind the exhibit:

“We needed to depict – not in words, but in pictures, -- the loss, the pain, but also the strength and resolve of New York, of Americans, of the world community to recover and rebuild on the site of the World Trade Center… a message that – without words – documents that the World Trade Center was not a collection of buildings or a set of businesses – but a community, a way of life, a symbol, a place of the living, and now also, the dead.” (Kennedy 318).

Liam Kennedy, Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College

Dublin, argues that in this case, photography is used as cultural diplomacy to communicate not

just “facts” but also “emotions and feelings.” After all, images have the power to change one’s

perception of reality. As Susan Sontag points out in her essay, “photographs… are themselves a

species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of

consensus” (Sontag 82). Kennedy reaffirms this, noting that the manipulative intentions of

photography are a way to lend ideological support to the “us against them” policies the

government advocates. “Photography is never innocent, however, and the historical tensions

between exceptionalism and universalism that have shadowed American diplomacy (reflecting

the contradictions of the founding myths of American nationhood) are reanimated in After

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September 11 through its visual assumption that the United States is the epicenter of the culture

of humanity.” (325-326). Building upon the idea of objective, context-dependent photography by

Brothers and Tagg, Kennedy argues that photography’s real motivation even in the modern

wartime age is for militarization and war support. He uses phrases like “never innocent”,

“shadowed”, “contradictions”, and “epicenter of the culture of humanity” in a negative and

sarcastic tone to indicate his disdain over the surreptitious schemes of government, and its

manipulation of public perception.

Of these manipulations, censorship is one of government’s most effective strategies in

controlling public opinion. Like the New York Post publishing the image of the subway accident,

many media outlets can choose to publish a war photograph, or censor it from public view,

depending on what it wants to accomplish. While Kennedy presents an argument against

censorship, many have argued that, in fact, censorship can be a good thing. There are both

personal and strategic reasons to censor a war photograph. A marine spokesman in the Iraq War

points out both reasons: “Specifically, Mr. Miller provided our enemy with an after-action report

on the effectiveness of their attack and on the response procedures of U.S. and Iraqi forces,” and

“Mr. Miller’s complete lack of respect to these marines, their friends, and families is shameful...

How do we explain to their children or families these disturbing pictures just days after it

happened?” (Spencer 1). In response to censorship in the Iraq War, Amitai Etzioni, Professor at

George Washington University and author of Limits of Privacy, argues “there are strong reasons

for keeping the media at arm's length. The war against terrorism must take place in the shadows

in which terrorists lurk. We cannot have our CIA agents named and subsequently killed” (Etzioni

1). In this statement, Etzioni poses an interesting argument from a military standpoint.

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However, he qualifies this statement. “Such phony optimism will encourage public

support in the short run, just as false low assessments of the enemy's size did early in the war in

Vietnam. But it undermines support in the longer run, along with the precious trust in

government” (1). He agrees that images should be more available to the public, and argues that

keeping the American public in the dark will make the war even dirtier than it needs to be.

While this sounds familiar to the propaganda and manipulation of photojournalism

throughout history, the social context today has one important difference: the spread of images

with technology. According to Susan Sontag, “The hunt for more dramatic – as they’re often

described – images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in

which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value.” (Sontag 87).

As images became more common, Sontag says, our culture demands more powerful, more

visually appealing ones. Michael Kamber, a photographer in the Iraq War, says that the war

began eight years ago with “shock and awe” and an enormous attendant gallery of picture-takers.

Naturally, many of the images were of staged events, such as Saddam’s statue coming down at

Firdus and American soldiers’ humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, aimed at shocking the

American public.

Eventually, however, the increase in war photography dulled the senses of viewers back

home. In today’s world, where information spreads faster than ever before through the Internet

and television, the average viewer may be hit with thousands of images per day. The

oversaturation of images has led to even more horrific images, but afterwards, desensitization.

After a while, the public became too exposed to even the most graphic images, and stopped

caring about what was happening overseas. The photos lost their meaning within, like Brothers

would argue, their cultural context. Soon enough, Kamber argues, “in the United States and

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Europe, editors and photographers decided that photographing the war was too dangerous, too

expensive and, perhaps most important, a terrible return on investment” (Kamber 1).

Desensitization turned the public eye away from the war, and sensing this change, news outlets

stopped covering it.

But one highly emotional picture that did impact the public was a photo by Detroit Free

Press photographer David Turnley, who candidly depicted a soldier, Sgt. Ken Kozakiewicz,

mourning the death of his fellow soldier. Called “the picture of the war” by Parade magazine,

the photo is one of only a few that honestly depicts the conflict and emotions of war. Turnley

spoke to the soldier’s father, David Kozakiewicz, about military censorship. “[He] explained that

the military was ‘trying to make us think this is antiseptic. But this is war. Where is the blood

and the reality of what is happening over there? Finally we have a picture of what really happens

in war.’ For David Kozakiewicz, showing his son grieving over the death of a fellow fighter gave

added meaning to the soldier's death.” (Lester 1). As Sontag said earlier, the image has a

profound effect on memory; one emotional picture can leave a lasting impression on the reader.

And not only is the impression a strong one, it is an honest, candid one, one that has meaning and

purpose. It depicts the complex physical and emotional whirlwind of war, and can inspire a

reader to take action, support the troops, fight for peace, or even just spread the word.

So how does this relate to the New York Post controversy? Many argue that the image

should not have been published because it is arrogant as a publisher to make the decision for

readers that they will be psychologically damaged from looking at a photo – a common argument

against censoring wartime photographs as well. In the NPR segment just days after the accident,

Stephen Mayes, managing director of VII Photo Agency and former VP of Getty Images, argued,

“It's wrong of us to intervene in that way and try and make those judgments for other people,

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particularly now in this day and age where we are in the Internet age, where the role of that

gatekeeper, that patriarchal… is fading” (NPR).

While Mayes’ argument is valid, ultimately the photo should not have been published,

especially when one considers the purpose of the New York Post. For the New York Post,

“controversy is not something to be avoided but courted,” according to David Folkenflik, NPR

media correspondent. “I don't think you'd find too many people at the Wall Street Journal or the

Financial Times finding a specific instance of violence to be as interesting, unless it's evoking a

greater truth” (NPR). Since the nature of the New York Post, as a tabloid, is to exploit local news

and violence and crime, “they thought we have something gripping and visceral that everyone

will be talking about it, and we don't care if it's in praise or condemnation, they're all going to

want to look at the front page of this paper” (NPR).

But what is its journalistic purpose? What Turnley and Kamber’s moving photographs

have shown us is that unlike a war photograph that carries meaning, or even a propagandist

photograph for the Gulf War, the New York Post’s publishing of the photograph does not serve

any greater purpose other than sensationalism of an accident. One caller in the NPR segment

agreed that tragic, traumatic images from the war zone is “something that people have to see

because it’s what brings up the discussion of humanity that we have.” Kelly McBride argues that

although war photographs are an invasion of privacy and may be hurtful for the people in the

photo, it has a “broader journalistic purpose. It's meant to reveal something to the audience so

that the audience can uphold their Democratic duties” (NPR). Many editors could argue the

photos held significant journalistic purpose of informing the public of gross tragedies and

holding the powerful accountable. But there does not seem to be any broader purpose to the

Post’s photo: there is literally nothing else we can do as an audience other than be shocked, or

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even hurt or scarred. It also causes great harm, both to the family of the man and to the

community of New York as a whole that views it. McBride argues that as a photographer, “you

have the privilege of telling stories to the rest of the world, and the choices that you make of

which stories you tell can change the course of history” (NPR). With this in mind, the New York

Post article is “more prurient and voyeuristic than it is journalistic” (NPR).

Images of war and images of accidents have many features in common: they are often

tragic, usually morbid, and serve to shock the viewer. In both the Iraq War media coverage and

the New York Post article, publishers take a hot, controversial event and through images, shape

public opinion for their own profit or other gain. As Sontag says, “To remember is, more and

more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture” (94); the media seeks to capitalize

on this persuasive power of images, especially through militarist propaganda. As we have seen

through historical and modern examples of war photography, the decision on whether or not to

censor a photograph is not simply black and white. However, while a photograph by nature

reflects the social and cultural context of its society, ultimately in today’s increasingly

desensitized society, we should decide the fate of a photograph not by its ability to shock, but by

its journalistic purpose. The New York Post with its tendency toward sensationalism does not

have a legitimate reason to publish the photograph, because as a viewer, we cannot react

purposefully.

As camera technology improves, and as we continue to be bombarded by photos on a

daily basis, the meaning in photographs can be lost in the sea of images. However, this Post

controversy has shown us that, especially in today’s information age, there is a line between

legitimate photojournalism and sensationalist nonsense.

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Works Cited

Brothers, Caroline. War and photography: A cultural history. Psychology Press, 1997.

Conley, Kirstan. “Suspect confesses in pushing death of Queens dad in Times Square subway

station.” New York Post 4 Dec. 2012. Print.

“Documenting Tragedy: The Ethics Of Photojournalism.” National Public Radio Media.

National Public Radio, 6 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

Estrin, James. “Witnesses to War” Lens: Photography, Video and Visual Journalism. The New

York Times, 2 Jul. 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

Etzioni, Amitai. "Censorship of war news undermines public trust." USA Today 23

Oct. 2001. Print.

Griffin, Michael, and Jongsoo Lee. "Picturing the Gulf War: constructing an image of war in

Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report." Journalism & Mass Communication

Quarterly 72.4 (1995): 813-825.

Kamber, Michael. “Bearing Witness in Iraq” Lens: Photography, Video and Visual Journalism.

The New York Times, 19 Dec. 2011. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

Kennedy, Liam. "Remembering September 11: photography as cultural

diplomacy." International Affairs 79.2 (2003): 315-326.

Lester, Paul Martin. “Military Censorship of Photographs.” Media Ethics Issues and Cases. 2.

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Ed. Philip Patterson and Lee Wilkins. Madison, WI: WCB Brown & Benchmark, 1994.

212-215. Print.

McBride, Kelly. “Would you snap a picture or pull the man to safety?” Poynter. The Poynter

Institute, 5 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2013

Spencer, Naomi. “Military censorship of the war in Iraq.” World Socialist Web Site. International

Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. U of

Minnesota Press, 1988.

Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War.” The New Yorker 9. Dec. 2002: 82-98. Print.