The Struggle Over Spin

Every photograph tells the truth. The question is which truth it tells. The story that Shalhevet Pass's final baby picture told was ghastly. After the 10-month-old girl was shot in the head by a Palestinian sniper in the West Bank city of Hebron last week, the Israeli Foreign Ministry disseminated the picture to the media, with her parents' consent and the rationalization of putting a face to Palestinian violence. She lies on her side, her dead eyes half-open, her blackened lips slack. A trickle of blood beneath her head stains her cheerfully patterned sheets. The photo is intimate, scrapbook-like; you do not ever want to see it, if only because it is nigh impossible to look at without imagining being the one taking it.

This conflict, of course, has forced many people to see sights they do not ever want to see. And determining which few of those sights the world shares has become a front in itself, a pixel intifadeh. The battle erupted on the Internet last December when msnbc.com sponsored a contest for the best news photo of 2000. The early leader was a picture of Mohammed al-Durra, 12, a terrified Palestinian boy screaming and hiding behind his father in the midst of a street battle in the Gaza Strip. Moments after the photo was taken, he was killed in the cross fire. Several weeks into the contest, however, a wave of Web surfers, spurred by mass e-mails among Israeli sympathizers, swamped the site with votes for cute-animal photos. (A crippled puppy using a wheeled cart for hind legs took the top spot.) The site canceled the contest last month on the ground that people were voting more than once.

War is complicated. Death is simple. And photos like these promise to assuage our longing for a simple answer to a temptingly simple question: Who is the bad guy here? Images of war have long helped sway opinion: the summary execution of a Viet Cong by a South Vietnamese police chief defined that war's casual cruelty. But victim photographs have usually better served the outgunned, like Iraqis leading media tours of purportedly civilian sites bombed during the Gulf War. For the overdog, the device risks showing weakness: pictures of American POWs in Vietnam undermined rather than galvanized support at home. But the Israelis, who in the first intifadeh suffered the ill p.r. effects of pictures of their soldiers firing on rock-throwing protesters, have learned that a measured message of victimhood is important to the well armed too. In the early days of this intifadeh, the Israeli government benefited from horrific images of the mob lynching of two Israeli soldiers.

The battle recalls the aftermath of last year's Elian Gonzalez raid, when the Cuban boy's Miami relatives and supporters of his father touted dueling images: Elian screaming before a submachine gun-toting INS agent, and a happy boy reunited with his dad. Editors and producers thus challenged will often use both sides' images. But a Solomon-like approach is not automatically evenhanded. News organizations tend to present conflicts from a perspective in which equal time--or photoplay--constitutes fairness. But to show a slain Jew for a slain Palestinian may imply that both sides have suffered equal losses, in a conflict in which 459 people, many of them children and most of them Palestinian, have died. Or it may imply equal culpability, in an eruption that began with Palestinian attacks. Likewise, even splitting the difference between Screaming Elian and Smiling Elian briefly changed the question from Whose child is this? to Did the Feds go too far? As long as images hold this power to shape debate, photographers' shots will continue to fly alongside the riflemen's, because every photograph tells the truth, except for the other guy's.