Back to Blog
Flicker images6/23/2023 Journalism history, of course, is filled with iconic images, single photographic frames etched into our psyches through their own intrinsic power and years of exposure - the Hindenburg disaster, the flag emplacement at Iwo Jima, the sailor kissing a stranger in Times Square after Japan's surrender, Harry Truman gleefully brandishing a wildly mistaken Chicago Tribune, a bloodied Y.A. Carlie's slender wrist in the grip of a grown man's hand. The logo-tization of news: This is a relatively new phenomenon, occurring when a journalistic image ceases to tell a story but becomes a symbol for a story, denuding it both of its actual news significance and of its inherent drama. Even before the little girl's body was found, her likeness had become commodified, the same as so much other news video in the modern media world. At some point, the stomach stops twisting. Numbing repetition, this is called, and not for nothing. It was, for days, the only event in this developing story for which there was a dramatic picture, so the image was played and replayed on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel and most everywhere else in the electronic world. And, therefore, from a television news director's point of view, it is a sensational tape. The clip is sinister, ominous, revealing, brief. The literal image is unremarkable what it implies is unspeakable. It's the Florida car wash video, chillingly documenting the beginning of God knows what, its very horror residing not in what it depicts but what it foreshadows. Carlie Brucia, age 11, is led away by a tattooed stranger. Watching the grainy, security-cam picture makes your stomach twist.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |