Many newspapers have run this recent story about an August 14th firefight in Afghanistan, but most of them have omitted one photo transmitted by AP to its subscribers. The story describes the death in combat of 21 year old U.S. Marine Joshua Bernard, shown here in his dress uniform.
The story is an excellent piece of war journalism, but the accompanying “slide shows” of most newspapers skip over the picture. If you look at the slide show in the above Akron Beacon story, you’ll see that this paper did not. Bush and Obama’s Secretary of Defense is criticizing AP for distributing the photo, which was transmitted yesterday to AP subscriber newspapers, and it’s a big topic among newspaper editors right now. Here is AP’s own account of the ongoing controversy, including comments by the photographer.
Jacobson, in a journal she kept, recalled Bernard’s ordeal as she lay in the dirt while Marines tried to save their comrade with bullets overhead.
“The other guys kept telling him ‘Bernard, you’re doing fine, you’re doing fine. You’re gonna make it. Stay with me Bernard!'” As one Marine cradled Bernard’s head, fellow Marines rushed forward with a stretcher.
Later, when she learned he had died, Jacobson thought about the pictures she had taken.
“To ignore a moment like that simply … would have been wrong. I was recording his impending death, just as I had recorded his life moments before walking the point in the bazaar,” she said. “Death is a part of life and most certainly a part of war. Isn’t that why we’re here? To document for now and for history the events of this war?”
Later, she showed members of his squad all the images taken that day and the Marines flipped through them on her computer one by one.
“They did stop when they came to that moment,” she said. “But none of them complained or grew angry about it. They understood that it was what it was. They understand, despite that he was their friend, it was the reality of things.”
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