About To Die: How News Images Move The Public


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About to Die Frontispiece: The visual can only use “but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.”—Gotthold Lessing, Laocoon, 1776. Laocoon, Copyright © 2001 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission. 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Barbie Zelizer Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zelizer Barbie. About to die : how news images move the public / Barbie Zelizer. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-19-975213-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-19-975214-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Photojournalism—Social aspects—United States. 2. Death—Press coverage—United States. 3. Collective memory—United States. I. Title TR820.Z45 2010 070.4'9—dc22 2010012024 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Journalism, Memory, and the Voice of the Visual 2 1 Why Images of Impending Death Make Sense in the News 28 3 Presumed Death 76 4 Possible Death 123 5 Certain Death 6 Journalism’s Mix of Presumption, 173 Possibility, and Certainty 218 vi • Contents 7 When the “As If” Erases Accountability 8 How News Images Move the Public Notes 327 Index 407 306 267 Acknowledgments For one who spent nearly two decades living in Jerusalem, it is telling that the decade of my working on this project was bookended with events from the Middle East. It is not a coincidence that my interest in images of impending death was sparked by the coverage of the renewed Intifada and the killing of twelve-year-old Mohammad Aldura in 2000 and wrapped shortly after the death of Iranian student Neda Agha-Soltan in Tehran in 2009. Indeed, the centrality of depictions of events from the Middle East in driving this book from beginning to end reminds me of how rarely our choices of scholarly projects stray from the personal. My gratitude for those around me over this decade is widespread and heartfelt. The project began at the behest of Barbara Biesecker and John Lucaites, who asked me to deliver a keynote for a conference they were hosting on visual rhetoric in 2001. Along the way, many individuals helped move it along: Roger Abrahams helped me conceptualize the project at its inception, while Larry Gross assisted me in seeing it to completion. Larry Gross, Michael Schudson, Linda Steiner, and Robin Wagner-Pacifici read drafts along the way, and Andrea Drugan, Peter Labella, and Jerome Singerman offered useful editorial advice. Shannon McLachlan, Brendan O’Neill, Lisa Force, and Jessica Ryan oversaw its production at Oxford University Press. The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University hosted me
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