Julie A., I agree in saying that photos do not provide onlookers with the full story. Images can evoke responses, sometimes sadness – as with the photo you mentioned from 9/11 – while other images from quite different stories can prompt us to laugh. Just yesterday, I read about a chimpanzee that used a long stick to whack a flying drone out of the air. Seeing the photo was not enough for me to laugh. I had to read the headline before I laughed, which was “Watch Curious Chimp Knock a Drone Out of the Sky” (Martins 1). Viewing a photo does not provide the exact context or frame in which the photo was taken. It doesn’t take us to the scene to experience the event firsthand. But, it doesn’t have to. It’s not the role of the photographer to always take a literal and figurative wide-angle shot. …show more content…
Embedded journalists are side by side with a military unit, so can be expected to report happenings as seen from inside a soldier’s world. That vantage point however, should not be discounted entirely but seen as enriching our information about what is going on in a conflict. Government limitations media coverage of war, however, causes me real concern. In an editorial in The Washington Post, David Ignatius expressed a similar opinion. “Living out in the Red Zone, as it were, with normal people, they have earned the right to be called free and independent journalists, at great personal risk. But they also know that to cover the action -- to get to Kandahar, or Marja, where I was a month ago -- they usually have no alternative but to embed” (Ignatius 1). The limitation of those who die in wars is a form of censorship that should not be observed. “Such images were not to be seen in case they aroused certain kinds of negative sentiment” (Butler 65). This pulls a curtain over what is happening and may mute our