In the hours after a mob in Falluja brutally killed four Americans, this grisly photo accompanied the story on the front page of The New York Times website.
The discussion on whether to place the image on the NYTimes.com front page went right to the top, to executive editor Bill Keller, according to the website’s associate editor for news Dan Bigman. Here’s the process the image went through, in Bigman’s words:
We had a discussion about the shot, the photo editors here felt that that was the image, that was what told the story. And I don’t think that exact one had been available earlier in the day, I’m not exactly sure on that.
But the process from there was they showed it to me, I thought, “OK, it’s an interesting photograph, but let’s run it up a little higher than me.” Len Apcar, my boss, the editor-in-chief, came out. He looked at it, and his first instinct was, “Eh, I don’t think so.” But then he thought about it a little bit, and he said, “You know, this deserves — this is the image. If it’s not this, then it’s a car fire and we’ve seen hundreds of Humvees on fire, we’ve seen hundreds of SUVs on fire. This is a different day and we need to show that graphically.” Or visually, I should say.
So he then got a copy of the photograph from the photo editors, and he showed it to Al Siegal and to Bill Keller and both of them said, “Yeah, great shot, go with it.”
Bigman said photo editors chose the shot from a pool of images, many of which were even more explicit. “I didn’t see on anyone’s site anything that compared to some of the worst things that were available,” Bigman said, “and certainly, we didn’t even get close.”
“We knew that the things that had taken place and the barbarism that had taken place signaled a bit of a change in what we had seen in these kinds of incidents in Iraq, and we needed to show people that,” Bigman said. “At the same time, we didn’t want to overwhelm people to the point where they couldn’t take in the information surrounding this in a reasonable way.”
While The New York Times does have written policies for handling photographs, those don’t include guidelines on how to treat gruesome images. But on that subject, according to Bigman, “there’s one policy, which is discussion.”
“I think that the key is really we need to be flexible in our thinking, and flexible to the situation,” Bigman said. “We always are … balancing the need to tell the story with not wanting to overwhelm the reader with an image that basically just shuts people down and turns them off to the rest of the report. That’s basically the policy is weighing things and thinking about things, in essence.”
The same photo featured on the home page appeared on the front page of Thursday’s printed edition. Discussions about using the image in the printed paper happened after the decision had been made for the website, but senior editors from the paper were familiar with the web staff’s decision, and an editor from the web staff participated in the later conversation.
Web editors hold photos used for the website to the same standard applied to the printed paper, Bigman said. “We would not run a photograph that would absolutely be a no to the newspaper. We’re the same entity. We’re not in the business of (doing) one thing that’s a little nastier online or a little grosser online, and the paper does something a little different for public consumption. That’s just not what we do. What we can do here, the luxury that we have online, however, is to telegraph to people that we’re going to be showing them something, if they choose to click on a link, that is a little more graphic than what they might be used to.”
Asked whether showing such an explicit image of the war could have political overtones, Bigman replied, “Everything we do at The New York Times has political overtones. Every photo choice we make has a political overtone to somebody. You should see my inbox.”
