Death Makes the News

How the Media Censor and Display the Dead

Jessica M. Fishman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780814724361
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the Eastern Communication Association's Everett Lee Hunt Award A behind-the-scenes account of how death is presented in the media Death is considered one of the most newsworthy events, but words do not tell the whole story. Pictures are also at the epicenter of journalism, and when photographers and editors illustrate fatalities, it often raises questions about how they distinguish between a “fit” and “unfit” image of death. Death Makes the News is the story of this controversial news practice: picturing the dead. Jessica Fishman uncovers the surprising editorial and political forces that structure how the news and media cover death. The patterns are striking, overturning long-held assumptions about which deaths are newsworthy and raising fundamental questions about the role that news images play in our society. In a look behind the curtain of newsrooms, Fishman observes editors and photojournalists from different types of organizations as they deliberate over which images of death make the cut, and why. She also investigates over 30 years of photojournalism in the tabloid and patrician press to establish when the dead are shown and whose dead body is most newsworthy, illustrating her findings with high-profile news events, including recent plane crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes, homicides, political unrest, and war-time attacks. Death Makes the News reveals that much of what we think we know about the news is wrong: while the patrician press claims that they do not show dead bodies, they are actually more likely than the tabloid press to show them—even though the tabloids actually claim to have no qualms showing these bodies. Dead foreigners are more likely to be shown than American bodies. At the same time, there are other unexpected but vivid patterns that offer insight into persistent editorial forces that routinely structure news coverage of death. An original view on the depiction of dead bodies in the media, Death Makes the News opens up new ways of thinking about how death is portrayed.

1

Introduction

“Newlyweds killed in car crash.” “Girl slain by stray bullet.” “Thousands dead in earthquake.” These are headlines in the news that, like many others, alert us to tragic events. Because news often begins where life ends, stories about suffering surround us daily. “When somebody’s killed, that’s news,” maintains the news director of a CBS television station.1 Another news industry insider reflects, “That something happened and someone died seems to be all the context required for a story. That death resulted is the key.”2 The industry enjoys consensus on this point: fatal events are among the most important and therefore most newsworthy events.

As disaster, disease, accident, and violence persistently strike, death makes good copy. But the words do not tell the whole story, and so, as reports emerge, cameras are there at the epicenter. At the scene, cameras can create an infinite number of images, but only one or two will get published. This process begs serious questions about the way we construct the news. When the media are organizing all this death into “newsworthy” pictures, how do photographers and editors make these decisions?

Because pictures craft boundaries with their frames, photojournalists and their editors must decide which aspects of reality to hide and which to illuminate. As a technical matter, photojournalists must decide when to selectively narrow their focus. After choosing which pictures to make, photojournalists then funnel a selection of their cache on to their editors, who must quickly decide which among these images will circulate publicly. They reject the vast majority and pick just a precious few.

With each catastrophe, photo editors at major news organizations will examine thousands of images of devastation, looking for one that will make the cut. Margaret Sullivan, New York Times public editor, reflects, “Editors constantly make decisions about what to include and what to leave out.” The selection of the seemingly right image can be a fraught process, burdened with representing parts of the event that are considered essential, or the entire event, as well as the larger symbolic implications of the event. Daniel Okrent, another public editor at the New York Times, explains that when tragedy strikes, they search for the pictures “in all ways commensurate to the event.”3 But what defines the commensurate image of death? Okrent adds that some pictures seem “to perfectly convey the news” while others seem “unfit.”4 But how does an editor distinguish between the “fit” and “unfit” image of death?

To address these questions, I gained behind-the-scenes access to see exactly which pictures are rejected. During this process, photojournalists and editors also shared their personal perspective in private interviews, where I promised anonymity to encourage frankness on this controversial topic.5 In addition, a team of researchers carefully tracked which pictures appeared in the news over a thirty-year period.

Because images of death have not been studied in this way before, and because certain myths about the news media are persuasive, the answers are often surprising. What we learn challenges conventional wisdom about our news culture because much of what we presume is inaccurate. The truth is even different from what the news editors themselves claim when explaining what influences their own judgment. The kinds of images they say they value differ from those they actually select.

The following chapters expose the algorithms determining the final product, thereby bringing some transparency to the behind-the-scenes decisions. What is uncovered demands a new perspective on the depiction of death, opening up new ways of thinking about how it is portrayed and, more broadly, the pervasive editorial forces, never stated explicitly, that persistently construct the news. This book attempts to explain these unwritten rules.

A Preview: Assessing Photo “Fitness”

According to conventional wisdom, the bar for deciding which images of death should be shown in the news is set very low, where just about anything goes. All kinds of sensationalist images of death seemingly abound in the news, provoking audiences to condemn them for indiscriminately trafficking in the morbid. Even photojournalists and their editors have strongly criticized their industry’s apparent fixation on death.

The news industry is said to be driven by an exploitive “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” mentality in which commercial success depends on the shock value of blood-splattered film. Powerful economic incentives are believed to demand attention-grabbing images, making the documentation of death a remunerative activity. In return, the industry’s allocation of its vast resources seems destined to favor the bad-news-is-big-news formula. Photojournalists, in particular, are considered indispensable to coverage of a crisis, and so, by almost any means necessary, they go swiftly to the front lines. Related expenses are viewed as a profitable investment that will be well rewarded in the competitive media market.

By seeping into the most esteemed corners of journalism, “tabloidization” is blamed for sensationalizing the news, making once-taboo images of death now commonplace. In her book Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death, Susan Moeller blames the “market-driven, tabloid-style” news for creating increasingly frequent corpse images and, consequently, an audience that has seen too much death to care. Howard Kurtz, the media reporter and columnist for the Washington Post, has argued that the crisis of “tabloidization” has infected quality papers like his: “We are complicit,” he alleged.6 Other critics (as discussed in the following chapter) have shared outrage over what is described as a horrifying trend.

As noted throughout this book, there are several reasons to expect that dead bodies will frequently appear in the news. But are such images indeed common? The answer is actually no, as explained in chapter 2. Despite a purported epidemic of “graphic” death spectacles, images of the corpse, also called postmortem pictures, are actually exceedingly rare. This has been the case for at least three decades. Despite the transformations of quickly changing media formats, as the news has spread from print and broadcast to newer technologies, each platform remains unlikely to visually document death. Digital and broadcast news media abstain at least as much as traditional print news because the newer media share the older media’s aversion to corpse images. Regardless of the novel technology, a reluctance to display death remains steadfast.

One may question whether the types of images that get published are limited not by reluctance so much as by feasibility. Perhaps photojournalists have very few opportunities to document dead bodies. For example, the police may arrive first at the scene and tape it off, prohibiting photojournalists from getting close enough. Other logistical challenges can arise that would make these photographs hard to obtain.

Can bad timing or insufficient access explain why deaths are rarely seen? The answer is no. Instead, there appears to be a strong editorial drive to hide these bodies, and the first half of this book (especially chapters 3, 4, and 5) makes this case. Paid staff photographers will risk their lives to directly document death, only to have their editors reject the resulting images. Photojournalists eventually learn to take pictures that conceal the corpse using camera techniques that the industry otherwise shuns. By creating a variety of images (which chapter 3 categorizes) that obliquely convey death, they indirectly and imaginatively suggest a body without actually showing it. When they produce these euphemistic pictures of death, it is not because they have nothing else to show.

Sometimes editors decide to run a picture that originally documented a dead body, but before publishing it they spend impressive effort digitally extracting the dead from the image. When powerful camera lenses zoom in to reveal a dead body, editors reverse course by employing postproduction Photoshop strategies to mask the evidence. Typically, the evidence is distorted beyond recognition with enlarged pixilation, or blurred with a digital smear. As editors carefully apply these techniques, they labor to undo the camera’s documentary achievements. This is notable for an industry that strives to provide an accurate account, and claims to forbid photographic manipulation.

With understandable skepticism, some may challenge the argument that the press is broadly aversive to showing death. That is, some may question the extent to which the press, in general, prioritizes restraint. One could reasonably argue that restraint is likely to be found only at the most reputable news sources, like the New York Times and Washington Post. After all, these esteemed news organizations are expected to be relatively restrained compared to the least-common-denominator appeal of television news and tabloids like the New York Post. In contrast to upscale news products, the popular press is described as especially likely to pander to debased, morbid interests. Presumably, the bottom-feeding news media, as they are disparagingly characterized, are guilty of trading eagerly in lurid fare.

But is the accusation grounded in fact? Do the oft-maligned popular media actually show death more often than their respected counterparts? The answer again is no. Overturning conventional thinking, the patrician press, like the New York Times, runs substantially more photographs of corpses than do tabloid and television news outlets, where the dead are all but invisible. We see (in chapter 8) that the corpse is exceedingly rare in the media most suspected of sensationalism because, despite their reputations, tabloids are the most reluctant to exhibit them. In fact, compared to the patrician press, tabloids use postmortem images less frequently and less prominently.

One may expect that photojournalists and their editors, who work diligently at their craft on a daily basis, would have fairly accurate insight into their decision-making processes. They are the ones immersed in the 24/7 production of the news, where they must rapidly decide among hundreds of images, and they are the ones whose livelihood depends on getting it right. It would be reasonable to assume that, given their intimate experience producing the news, their account of what they do would avoid major misconceptions.

But do industry insiders have a realistic understanding of their own news practices? The answer, again, is no. Editors and photojournalists apparently endorse the same myths as do the rest of us. For example, photo editors also believe that corpse images are common in the news media, especially in tabloids like the New York Post. It turns out, we all get it backwards.

Exceptions to the Rule

After documenting the systematic and widespread self-censorship in the news, the second half of this book examines the relatively rare occasions when death is depicted directly, showing the body. Certain types of death are considered worth viewing, and these exceptions highlight the importance of nationality, race, and age, although not in the ways often expected. Yet, with a new, simple formula, the exceptions are remarkably predictable. Once we realize how firmly the norms of disclosure are set, the exceptions are easy to foresee.

In prior studies of U.S. news media, scholars have concluded that the death of an American is much more likely to be considered newsworthy than that of a foreigner. But these conclusions are based on studies of written or verbal reporting, after analysis of things like headlines and story copy, because the research was focused on what the news communicates through words. This prompts us to ask, do images in the news follow the same formula?

The answer is, not really. The deaths that are most likely to be judged fit for word-based reporting are least likely to be judged fit for pictures. As illustrated in chapter 9, American deaths are paid the most attention, as measured by words, but their bodies remain nearly invisible. Therefore, on the rare occasions when pictures of the corpse do appear, they document foreign fatalities.

Race also influences what gets considered newsworthy. Given that we associate the abject corpse with foreigners, it would be reasonable to expect that racial hierarchies also have an effect. One might expect that postmortem pictures are most likely to show the world’s dark-skinned victims, but pictures of Caucasian victims are, by far, the most common. They are the most common overall, and they are also the most common when coverage of foreign and domestic death is analyzed separately.

Consider figures 1.1 and 1.2, which include photographs published in December 2016 on the home page of the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. These pictures document the slain Russian ambassador to Turkey. Such images illustrate the ...