25 Comments

1. PeterUK:

Are not the photographers material witnesses and their pictures evidence? Should they not be helping the Iraqi police with their enqiries?

Wiil the have to attened identity parades in the case of arrests.

Another thing that puzzles me is that,in a situation as you describe Roger,someone with a camera is more likely to be another victim.

The whole thing stinks.

Dec 20, 2004 - 11:38 am 2. Anthony Ragan:

Given AP’s screaming bias against the Bush Administration (including reporters filing false stories), it wouldn’t suprise me if the terrorists had tipped them off beforehand, as “friendlies.”

Dec 20, 2004 - 11:56 am 3. Terrye:

This is not the first time something like this has happened. Somehow reporters have been there for car bombs and road side bombs and assasinations. I remember when a Pal cameraman was shot by a soldier last year and the soldier said that all hell had broken loose and the man had the camera on his shoulder and in that minute the soldiers thought it was a weapon. Well, why was the cameraman standing there with film rolling when the shooting started?

Dec 20, 2004 - 12:04 pm 4. Solomon:

Loosely related, but the Boston Globe has a screen capture of an “Al Manar Exclusive” (Hizballah’s mouthpiece) - footage at the scene of the Najaf and Karbala bombings. It’s part of the same story as the election officials ambush. That could lead to all sorts of irresponsible speculation: http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archives/005184.shtml

Dec 20, 2004 - 12:09 pm 5. charlotte:

What surprise here? It’s common knowledge that 99% of Western and Arab photo journalists and 100% of terrorist “insurgents” are equipped and willing to shoot whatever it takes to undermine US and Coalition efforts in Iraq.

Dec 20, 2004 - 12:11 pm 6. Pat Curley:

What annoys me is the terming of these murders as “executions”.

Dec 20, 2004 - 12:17 pm 7. Duke:

I too have lived in LA for more than 20 years and I have witnessed two gang killings. In both cases I was either in or very near Bloods territory; let me assure you that it has been ten years since I ventured south of Adams Blvd in most areas of town. Much has been written about reporters reporting from the hotels in Baghdad or even London where they’d never get pix of anything. It’s possible they were traveling with a target because there was a bigger story of the election to cover.

Then again……

BTW, LA has had an insurgency for more than 20 years as any Google search of the 18th street gang will attest….

Dec 20, 2004 - 12:44 pm 8. catherinea:

american or foreign reporters are rarely able to leave the green zone to do any reporting. i’d guess it’s likely that an iraqi took these pictures and passed them along or sold them.

Dec 20, 2004 - 1:34 pm 9. catherinea:

american or foreign reporters are rarely able to leave the green zone to do any reporting. my guess is that the AP might have taken on a bunch of iraqis to do some reporting/photography, or else the photos were passed along to the AP and they decided to claim them as taken by one of their photographers. or maybe not.

Dec 20, 2004 - 1:36 pm 10. Terrye:

catherinea:

It is not that they can’t leave certain areas, they won’t. I am not being nasty or anything but much of the reporting has been done from a hotel with stuff they got off the wire.

That makes me all that much more curious as to how they happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Dec 20, 2004 - 2:15 pm 11. catherinea:

well, i did a little research. the photo that wretchard cites is credited to AP/STR. STR means stringer in AP shorthand, whereas if it’s a staff member, they’ll say STF. and a stringer, in journalism, usually means freelancer. so i would just assume a random (and probably iraqi) photographer happened to be in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place, etc), snapped the photos, and gave or sold them to the AP. i also don’t think it is likely that an american/obvious foreigner with a camera at that scene would have been brave or crazy enough to whip it out and try documenting the murderous, insane executioners.

Dec 20, 2004 - 3:26 pm 12. Morgan:

catherinea:

Thanks for the sleuthing. Not knowing anything about journalistic photography, I wonder just how loosely affiliated a “stringer” can be. The AP doesn’t know me from Adam - if I had a good picture, could I call the local AP office and get a few bucks for it, or do they need to know me first?

It seems to me that the question of whether the person who took the picture was in some way affiliated with or tipped off by the gunmen is still open. Or you could be right that it was just a random Iraqi.

Dec 20, 2004 - 4:01 pm 13. PeterUK:

So the stringer gets a bonus and the terrorists get a photo opportunity,all very nice and cosy,what is an innocent Iraqis life worth nowadays?

Dec 20, 2004 - 4:24 pm 14. lindenen:

“So the stringer gets a bonus and the terrorists get a photo opportunity,all very nice and cosy,what is an innocent Iraqis life worth nowadays?”

No stringer’s getting a bonus, but some terrorist sure is.

Dec 20, 2004 - 7:08 pm 15. catherinea:

Not knowing anything about journalistic photography, I wonder just how loosely affiliated a “stringer” can be. The AP doesn’t know me from Adam - if I had a good picture, could I call the local AP office and get a few bucks for it, or do they need to know me first?

that’s a good question. i’m not sure how it works in iraq or abroad, but i found this article on stringer procedures. other message boards i’ve read say that in their smaller communities, they’d be able to submit photos randomly to the AP, but they’d only make from $5-$20 per photo. but again, i’m not sure how the AP is functioning in iraq.

Dec 21, 2004 - 6:46 am 16. Morgan:

catherinea:

More sleuthing! Thanks for the link. Now if only a tornado would hit the house while my camera was… wait, do I own a camera?

Dec 21, 2004 - 7:01 am 17. Tollhouse:

So the stringer gets a bonus and the terrorists get a photo opportunity,all very nice and cosy,what is an innocent Iraqis life worth nowadays?

Now that’s odd. I’m getting a strong feeling of deja vue. I’m sure I read an almost identical posting somewhere else a while ago.

It is disturbing that the AP can be used so transparently if so, but I suppose I should be surprised considering the NYT prints press releases as “news”.

Dec 21, 2004 - 9:11 am 18. Jon:

I was watching CNN almost a year ago and watched a story about a western journalist who was invited along to witness a bombing by Iraqi insurgents. The journalist was carrying only a video camera and was not told where he was going or what was going to happen. The insurgents stopped the car, pointed the guy towards where the bombing was to take place and then a minute later the explosion happened.

Now, the choice here is this: Should the journalist have gone with the insurgents in the first place? This journalist produced stories for the western press about Iraqi insurgents, who they are fighting, why they are fighting, etc. This, in my estimation, gives invaluable information to the American people about who their soldiers are fighting and why. This information, of course, could (and probably was) used by the American military to better understand the enemy that they faced.

From the journalist’s point of view, the choice was simple… they could either sit in the green zone watching Al Jazeera, hoping for a glimpse at what was happening around them, or they could get out there and capture the story for themselves and put their own biases on it (or, god forbid, produce an unbiased story). It’s not like they could have stopped the insurgents from conducting the bombing, or even passed along any information that would have been useful to the American military. The only choice was to cover the story or not.

This mass speculation about terrorists giving journalists the opportunity to avert disaster is ridiculous. No terrorist organization is going to call up a journalist and say “Hey, yeah, we’re going to blow up the building on the corner of 1st and Main tomorrow morning at 8:20am, so come on over with a camera if you’d like… oh, and please don’t tell the American military”.

Dec 21, 2004 - 9:18 am 19. Dolce Vita:

I’m a photojournalist and familiar with how the AP works. Basically, anybody who sells AP pictures is a stringer (and yes /str means it was shot by a stringer).

That tag by the credit means whoever shot it was not an AP photographer or even necessarily a photojournalist. Sometimes people at news events take pictures and sell them to the AP without having had any experience as a photographer, such as in the case of the Pulitzer-winning picture of the firefighter and the child at the Oklahoma City bombing.

Even the AP stringers–part-time or assignment based photographers–have signed contracts and do not have the /str notation on their credit. So I highly doubt it was taken by someone affiliated in any way with the AP.

It is unlikely those photos were taken by a Western freelancer due to the risks involved in travelling around. It’s likely it was an Iraqi photographer, and frankly the AP doesn’t care much where the photos come from, so the person who took them may very well have had prior knowledge of something going down.

Dec 21, 2004 - 9:56 am 20. Morgan:

Dolce Vita:

Thanks for the information. Bloggic Concentration of Distributed Knowledge strikes again!

Dec 21, 2004 - 10:15 am 21. PeterUK:

Jon,

But what if the only requirement for the explosion to take place was the presence of a photo-journalist?

My contention is that not a few of the outrages are staged for the benefit of journalists and the “neutral conduit” stance of journalists has got to be re-examined in the light of this.

If the journalist had not have gone would there have been an explosion?

Journalistic principles,as they exist,exist within the new paradigm of warfare,there are those who have no compunction committing atrocities in the full glare of publicity,atrocities for which they can be tried as war criminals.They don’t care!

So perhaps journalists should think carefully about every tip off the receive, “Am I the observer or the reason?”

Dec 21, 2004 - 12:07 pm 22. SallyScott:

The following comment is from Salon.com: (I try to read from as many sources as possible, and try not to limit myself to just “right wing” or “left wing” news. The truth lies somewhere in-between, and making assumptions based on little or one-sided evidence is irresponsible at best. And discounting sources only because they don’t agree with your previously held assumptions is also unwise.)

“No clear evidence exists that the killers were Baathists, as opposed to militant Islamists or another subversive group. Wretchard and Simon also seem to have overlooked why journalists could have had plenty of reason to be in the vicinity of Haifa Street. As Lekic noted in his report, the “busy, traffic-clogged street has been the scene of almost daily gunfights between the insurgents and U.S. troops and the forces of the U.S.-installed interim government.”

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.

Reporting from the most perilous sectors of a war zone is a complicated business, both in terms of access and safety. The kind of flimsy commentary-with-an-agenda bouncing around the conservative blogosphere right now regarding an AP insurgency against the war effort is not only a disservice to the public but a dishonor to the many journalists who have been injured or killed carrying out their dangerous mission in Iraq.”

Dec 22, 2004 - 9:16 pm 23. Joel Català:

It can be seen that, beyond Chesnot and Malbrunot, there are a lot more hijacked journalists.

Mentally hijacked, I mean.

Dec 23, 2004 - 5:54 am 24. PeterUK:

“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.”

To quote that famous British prostitute,sorry,other prostitute,Mandy Rice-Davis “They would say that wouldn’t they?”

Dec 23, 2004 - 11:15 am 25. Das Grauen:

‘Extremely long odds’ that a journalist may take a picture of a live execution, starring a VIP of a foreign state, at a place with a high chance of violence? What do you think about this picture:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1221141/posts

Must be a fake, right?

Coincidences do happen in reality, not only in books. Moses Wine would know that. But you have become a total bonehead.

Apr 7, 2005 - 3:34 am

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