(Dobbs) It's Easier To Look Away. We Shouldn't.
From napalm in Vietnam to murder in Minneapolis.
Between war in Ukraine and shootings in America, I hear friends say, “I have to tune it out, I just can’t watch any more.”
I get that. But I think it’s a mistake.
So does Kim Phuc Phan Thi, whose name you don’t know but whose photograph you can never forget. She was the nine-year-old girl from a village in South Vietnam whose image, running burned and naked after a napalm air attack, became one of the most famous photos from, and a metaphor for the gruesomeness of, the Vietnam War.
As she said today in The New York Times, the photo plagued her for much of her life. “I grew up detesting that photo,” she wrote from Canada, where she moved as a young adult. “Why was I the only kid naked while my brothers and cousins in the photo had their clothes on? I felt ugly and ashamed.”
But she also came to feel proud, “proud that, in time, I have become a symbol of peace.”
That is the power of a picture.
“It is easier to hide from the realities of war,” she wrote, “if we don’t see the consequences. That picture will always serve as a reminder of the unspeakable evil of which humanity is capable.”
In the present day, pictures are how we see the merciless injustice of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
And of the utter illogic of militant guns rights advocates in America.
That is why, whether it’s battles overseas or butchery here at home, I think people should look.
Photographer David Hume Kennerly, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his own work in Vietnam, quotes journalist Nicholas Kristof, who once summed it up this way: “Photos move people the way prose never does.” And they can move decision-makers too. “Evocative images,” Kennerly contends, “can affect policy, spur action, and every now and then alter the course of history.”
What stronger example than the murder two years ago in Minneapolis of George Floyd. It was hard to watch, but how would you know what to think if you didn’t?
Here’s another very strong example that I take personally. A friend of mine and fellow correspondent at ABC named Bill Stewart, with whom I had recently worked during the revolution in Iran, was then sent to cover the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. One day during a battle, Bill walked up to a demarcation line, unarmed and holding his press ID, and asked a Nicaraguan soldier for permission to cross. But the soldier, evidently resentful of flagging American support for his government, forced him instead to lie down on the pavement. Then he kicked Bill in the ribs, paced for a few seconds, lifted his rifle, and shot Bill dead.
Video of the murder, recorded by Bill’s camera crew— not knowing of course what the soldier was about to do— aired worldwide. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance harshly condemned the government we were backing, which was run by a right-wing dictator. Not long after, President Jimmy Carter stopped backing it altogether.
That is the power of a picture.
There are of course persuasive arguments for restraint when it comes to airing or publishing pictures of carnage. The slaughter of those 19 schoolchildren in Texas the week before last is a case in point. NYU journalism professor Susie Linfield has written an essay with the title, “Should We Be Forced To See Exactly What An AR-15 Does To A 10-Year-Old?” My answer is no, we shouldn’t, we should not be forced. But we also should not be protected. And professor Linfield makes a good argument for that. “A violent society ought, at the very least, to regard its handiwork, however ugly, whether it be the toll on the men and women who fight in our name, on ‘ordinary’ crime victims killed or wounded by guns or on children whose right to grow up has been sacrificed to the right to bear arms.”
In fairness to the families of the children gunned down though, she goes on to ask, “How to balance a family’s right to privacy with the public’s right to know?”
The answer isn’t black or white. I always have fought for the public’s right to know, but there are credible concerns about privacy, about sensitivity… especially when we’re talking about children. I believe that on a scale, the family’s rights weigh the most.
But there are unpersuasive arguments too, and I had to deal with them many times. What’s more, they sometimes came from the producers and editors of the very broadcasts for which I worked. During the war to oust dictator Idi Amin from Uganda, we had one egregiously gruesome shot of a huge stack of bodies piled up behind Parliament, massacred by Amin’s soldiers as they fled Kampala, the capital. It encapsulated the savagery of Idi Amin’s regime. But back at ABC headquarters, they took it out. “Too bloody,” I was told.
After an earthquake in Yemen, we recorded a pitiful scene of a sobbing father cradling his dead daughter in his arms. He had dug through rubble with his bare bloodied hands until he found his little girl, mangled by the boulders that had buried her. It was a symbol of the thousands of deaths the earthquake had triggered, and the thousands of survivors who grieved. But that too had to come out. Why? “It will unnerve some viewers.”
In Iran during the revolution, we documented a massacre by the Shah’s Imperial Guard against unarmed protestors near the university in Tehran. Upwards of a hundred were shot down. But in the story that aired, closeups were removed. I was given the “too bloody” excuse again but because the United States still was on the Shah’s side, I always suspected it was political.
And after a devastating earthquake in the Apennine Mountains in southern Italy, we were witness to a heart-rending scene when the then-brand-new Pope John Paul II landed by helicopter in a village where we happened to be.
He walked amidst the ruins of a church that had collapsed during Mass, then stopped two men carrying a corpse on a crude gurney, pulled back a dirty sheet from the victim’s face, and planted a kiss on his disfigured forehead. But it never made air. What a producer told me was, “We can’t upset our viewers at dinnertime.”
Oh yes we can. We can and we should. It’s about the reality of life… if not ours, then someone else’s. And sometimes it might make a difference. A photographer, a publisher, a producer can’t know which way a picture might swing public opinion. But the public itself can’t know which way to swing if it isn’t given the chance to look.
To be sure, news organizations have become more permissive about this reality. They’ve had no choice. People are appallingly inured to brutality by the 21st-Century culture of violent video games and movies and all the rest…
… and by an internet that makes graphic images accessible to anyone who wants to take a look.
The key question is, how can we make wise decisions about public policy, or simply about personal empathy, if we just turn away? As photographer David Kennerly says, “Photographs are a direct line to people, over the heads of officials, pundits and disinformation.” That’s true whether they undercut the lies of a Russian president or of American politicians trying to distract us from our disgust about mass murders.
That’s why I think it’s a mistake to say, “I have to tune it out, I just can’t watch any more.”
Whether I agree on certain controversial issues or not, I extend the argument to other movements to show the outcomes of public policy. Like proposals to require tobacco companies to include graphic images of lung cancer in their marketing. Like campaigns by opponents of legal abortion to show explicit images of aborted fetuses. Even like televising the executions of condemned killers because if some of us, for a variety of reasons, support capital punishment, then we ought to be willing to watch it.
Seeing these things might soften some people’s minds about the righteousness of their positions and harden them in others. But whether we’re talking about fighting wars abroad or fighting on the fronts of social issues in America, it’s the only way the public can see what it’s being asked to oppose or support.
That is the power of a picture.
As David Kennerly puts it, “The best photographs… might make us want to look away. It’s imperative that we do not.”
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
As a pathologist, I strongly support showing what an AR-15 does to a human body. Ever since Sandy Hook, I personally felt that had I been a parent I would have found a way to publish photos of the what 11 rounds in a 3 1/2" foot child with an average weight of 40lbs at close range would look like. Just like Emmitt Till's mom found a way to get through that those the horrific, lethal wounds are NOT Hollywood theater. The Uvalde children were unrecognizable in many instances. Try to imagine why that is the case! And yes it is gruesome--but could shock sense into many who haven't stopped to imagine why so very few shot with that weapon survive.
Important essay, Greg. I think of the many times I've seen explicit photos from the Nazi death camps...or the Vietnam photos ...or Geo Floyd. These explicit documents do call many of us to action...I suspect even some of the NRA Amen chorus in the US Congress would be moved seeing 9 year old children whose heads have been blown away by an assault weapon wielded by an 18 year old. And I seriously doubt that the marijuana made him do it (while Carlson and Ingraham likely don't read your essays, that was to respond to their nonsense).