Soccer Dad

The degradation of the AP

AP photographer Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for a photograph showing Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a prisoner. It was an image that defined Eddie Adams' career. But he had some remorse.

But fame -- instant, enduring and discomforting -- resulted from a single photo taken Feb. 1, 1968, the second day of the communists' Tet Offensive, in the embattled streets of Cholon, Saigon's Chinese quarter.

Drawn by gunfire, Mr. Adams and an NBC film crew watched South Vietnamese soldiers bring a handcuffed Viet Cong captive to a street corner, where they assumed he would be interrogated. Instead, South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, strode up, wordlessly drew a pistol and shot the man in the head.

Mr. Adams caught the instant of death in a photo that made front pages worldwide. It would become one of the Vietnam's War's most indelible images, shocking the American public and used by critics to dispute official claims that the war was being won.

In later years, Mr. Adams found himself so defined and haunted by the picture that he would not display it at his studio. He also felt it unfairly maligned Loan, who lived in Virginia after the war and died in 1998.

"The guy was a hero," Mr. Adams said, recalling Loan's explanation that the man he executed was a Viet Cong captain, responsible for murdering the family of Loan's closest aide a few hours earlier.

"Sometimes a picture can be misleading because it does not tell the whole story," Mr. Adams said in an interview for a 1972 AP photo book. "I don't say what he did was right, but he was fighting a war and he was up against some pretty bad people."

But if Eddie Adams was a reluctant witness to history 35 years ago, the most recent winners of the Pulitzers for their photopraphs seemingly have no such compunctions. Belmont Club compares yesterday's photographer with today's:

Even with today's proliferation of compact photographic equipment, a legitimate photojournalist rarely gets the opportunity to capture an execution. Apart from the beheadings which are purposely recorded on video by the jihadis and from gun camera film, most footage of people actually being shot are taken by photographers in company with combatants who are ready to film an ambush. Those individuals are combat cameramen for their armies or embedded reporters. The most famous analogue to the Associated Press sequence of photographs is probably the Eddie Adams photo of the execution of Vietcong Captain Bay Lop by South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Adams owed that opportunity to General Loan himself, who brought Adams along to cover what he believed to be a justifiable summary execution. Adams depressed the shutter at exactly the moment Loan fired and photo analysis actually shows the impact of the bullet on Bay Lop's skull.

It may have been pure luck, but it was surely the longest of odds that would have brought an Associated Press cameraman to the site of a surprise attack on two Iraqi electoral workers. As it was, the AP photograph was unable to capture the actual execution, only the moments shortly before and after the Iraqis were killed. Although the Eddie Adams photograph was widely used to illustrate the 'brutality' of the Saigon government, the photos taken by the Associated Press are unlikely to reflect badly on the electoral worker's killers. Press reports highlight the confidence and boldness of the insurgents. "Both of the victims shown in the sequence wore traditional Arab headscarfs. In contrast, the attackers were bareheaded and apparently unafraid to show their faces", suggesting that 'collaborators' must conceal their faces while the Ba'athists stride with impunity through the light of day. It was fortunate for the AP that their photographer was accidentally there.

Belmont Club of course is being facetious. And Powerline asks - and answers -the questions that Belmont Club alluded to:

We have written a couple of times about the accusations of complicity with terrorists in Iraq which were made recently by Belmont Club and others. The issue relates to the shocking photo, recently published by the AP, showing three terrorists in the act of murdering two Iraqi election workers on a street during daylight. The photographer was obviously within a few yards of the scene of the murder, which raises obvious questions, such as 1) what was the photographer doing there; did he have advance knowledge of the crime, or was he even accompanying the terrorists? and 2) why did the photographer apparently have no fear of the terrorists, or conversely, why were the terrorists evidently unconcerned about being photographed in the commission of a murder?

Salon printed a defense of the AP (and an attack on conservative bloggers) that included this anonymous comment from an AP spokesman:

A source at the Associated Press knowledgeable about the events covered in Baghdad on Sunday told Salon that accusations that the photographer was aware of the militants' plans are "ridiculous." The photographer, whose identity the AP is withholding due to safety concerns, was likely "tipped off to a demonstration that was supposed to take place on Haifa Street," said the AP source, who was not at liberty to comment by name. But the photographer "definitely would not have had foreknowledge" of a violent event like an execution, the source said.
So the AP admitted that its photographer was "tipped off" by the terrorists. The only quibble asserted by the AP was that the photographer expected only a "demonstration," not a murder. So the terrorists wanted to be photographed carrying out the murder, to sow more terror in Iraq and to demoralize American voters. That's why they tipped off the photographer, and that's why they dragged the two election workers from their car, so they could be shot in front of the AP's obliging camera. And the AP was happy to cooperate with the terrorists in all respects. We'd like to ask some more questions of the photographer, of course, but that's impossible since the AP won't identify him because of "safety concerns." Really? Who would endanger his safety? The terrorists? They could have shot him on Sunday if they were unhappy about having their picture taken. But they weren't, which is why they "tipped off" the photographer. Belmont Club responded to the Salon defense here, in a post we linked to a day or two ago.

AP as we can see defended its cameraman in this specific example. But the questions remain and it certainly seems credible that the anonymous photographer would have had foreknowledge of exactly what was to transpire and he merely recorded it instead of taking any actions to forestall it.
(See also LGF's "Incident on Haifa Street")
This recalls two incidents.
One is from the late 1980's at a panel discussion of ethics, specifically ethics in the battlefield. At a symposium Peter Jennings was asked what he would do if he were interviewing enemies of the United States when he became aware that the people he was interviewing posed a threat to American troops in the area. Jennings replied, that he would do all he could to warn the American troops even at the cost of his own life. This seemingly proper and moral response, apparently was too much for another panel member, Mike Wallace. Wallace lectured the younger man:

"I think some other reporters would have a different reaction," he said, obviously referring to himself. "They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover." "I am astonished, really," at Jennings's answer, Wallace saida moment later. He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: "You're a reporter. Granted you're an American"-at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship. "I'm a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you're an American, you would not have covered that story."

Then there was a quesiton asked of Loren Jenkins of NPR news. Would he report the presence of an American commando unit that he discovered in the course of his reporting?

"The game of reporting is to smoke 'em out," he says. Asked whether his team would report the presence of an American commando unit it found in, say, a northern Pakistan village, he doesn't exhibit any of the hesitation of some of his news-business colleagues, who stress that they try to factor security issues into their coverage decisions.

"You report it," Jenkins says. "I don't represent the government. I represent history, information, what happened."...

So Wallace and Jenkins see themselves invested in some sort of higher morality. A morality to simply be lenses to history. Neither asks himself if his choice to assist America's enemies - either by silence or by communication - is indeed affecting the outcome. This view that journalists must not take sides is disturbing enough when the case affects combatants. But in the AP case, those who were slaughtered while the photographer participated in getting the terrorists' message out were election workers; non-combatants. In fact they were non-combatants who were workng to mid-wife a democracy. There is something truly perverse of a news organization abetting those seeking to thwart demcracy when a free press is one of the hallmarks of democracy.
But it doesn't seem to bother the AP much.
How did the AP celebrate the news that its photographers had won the Pulitzer?

As a crowd gathered around the photo desk at AP headquarters, President and CEO Tom Curley stood atop a chair beside Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll to congratulate the staff.

"These folks showed incredible courage this year," Curley said. "They took some extraordinary pictures, they captured some incredible moments in history and they did it in a way that made all of us proud."

Proud indeed. Proud to have sided with the insurgents intent on subverting freedom.
And not only is the newsroom in denial of its employees' complicity in fostering tyranny. The whole profession is, for rewarding this perfidious behavior with an award of its esteem.
Look through the gallery of winning pictures at the Pulitzer Prize website. You'll notice that a number of them were taken by AP photographer, Bilal Hussein. Mr. Hussein seemed to get quite a few exclusive close ups the terrorists. This led to an observation at Darleen's Place ( thanks to blogdigger:

I have trouble with how cozy this AP photographer is with the terrorists.

Is Bilal Hussein, who seems to have pretty close ties to the anti-American and anti-Iraqi insurgency in Iraq, really a journalist? Or is he a propagandizer? Again this quesiton doesn't seem to bother AP or the Pulitzer committee too much. He was part of a group that received an award for breaking news photography.
It's a shame to see how the AP has degraded itself in 35 years.
UPDATE: Welcome to Secular Blasphemy readers. Other blogs covering this outrage are The Jawa Report, Michelle Malkin, Power Line, Little Green Footballs and Roger L Simon. Since LGF brings it up, here's my nomination for a Pulitzer.
UPDATE II:In fairness to AP (via The Jawa Report) Wizbang! doesn't think that the picture of the murder of election workers shows collusion between AP and the insurgents. But the Jawa Report remains insistent that Bilal Hussein's apparently comfortable ties to the insurgency are not so easily explained away.

Posted by SoccerDad at April 5, 2005 01:46 AM | TrackBack