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4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: July 31st, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/world/middleeast/26censor....
The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war. Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. After five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers. Opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see in whatever medium the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans. Journalists say it is now harder ... to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. And while publishing photos of American dead is not barred under the embed rules in which journalists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military. "It is absolutely censorship, Mr. Miller said. I took pictures of something they didnt like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I dont see a clearer definition of censorship."
Note: For more coverage of war censorship and the realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, click here.
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