![]() dailies examined, 21 placed the photograph on the front page in the days soon after it was taken on June 8, 1972.įourteen of the 21 newspapers displayed “Napalm Girl” above the front-page fold, a newspaper’s most coveted placement.īut 19 newspapers examined either did not publish “Napalm Girl” or placed the photograph on an inside page. I present data challenging that notion, reporting in Getting It Wrong that of 40 major U.S. Napalm Girl has become invested with mythic qualities and a power that no photograph, however distinctive and exceptional, can project.”Īmong the myths is that “Napalm Girl” was so arresting and extraordinary that it appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States. “Over the years,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “the superlatives associated with the image have edged into hyperbole and exaggeration. I address the myths of “Napalm Girl” in my book, Getting It Wrong, an expanded second edition of which was published recently. There’s no evidence, moreover, that “Napalm Girl” helped “tip the scales of policy.” (The essay in the Times cited none.) The photograph, which showed a cluster of terror-stricken children fleeing an errant napalm attack on their village northwest of what was then called Saigon, provoked no prolonged conversation in the American press in the days following its publication. These pictures drove news cycles for weeks, months, years, helping tip the scales of policy.” … There was Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph from South Vietnam of the naked 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, screaming, burned by napalm. “Pictures of war and suffering have pricked the public conscience and provoked action before. Of particular interest to Media Myth Alert was a passage deeper in the essay that invoked “ Napalm Girl“: “They keep coming,” the essay began, “both the bombs and the images from Aleppo, so many of them ….” The wartime images accompanied an essay about the misery of Syria’s battered city, Aleppo, once a rebel stronghold in the country’s prolonged civil war. ![]() ![]() Prominently displayed on the front page of today’s New York Times were powerful images of war - the memorable and myth-burdened “ Napalm Girl” photograph of 1972 among them. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |