AYLAN KURDI, 3 year old is a victim of Syria's civil war, the brutality of Assad, the horror of isis, the politics, greed and indifference of saudi arabia and the gulf states including Iran, though he died in the Agean Sea when the smugglers boat he was in with the rest of his family capsized and he drowned with his mother and brother, his little body washed up on a Turkish beach. Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are overwhelmed by refugees. It is disgraceful the rich Islamic countries of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf leave these people to suffer in refugee camps while these countries commit hundreds of millions of dollars funding fighters of various political and religious factions for their own "religious and political gain. These "Muslim" leaders have turned their backs on the suffering of fellow Muslims, and that has not been lost on the refugees, for if they felt saudi arabia, the Gulf States and Iran were actually Muslim countries wouldn't these refugees be going there? What must the Prophet think? From +Foreign Policy and Poynter.org.....
A Range of Reactions to Photo of Dead Syrian Child Across Global Media
The heart-wrenching photo of the
body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, lying face-down on a Turkish beach,
took up more than half of Thursday’s front page of Beirut newspaper Al-Mustaqbal.
“Death upon the wave,” read the headline under a close-up image of the
tiny body. Across much of Europe, the news coverage was only slightly
more muted: “The drama that embarasses Europe,” scolded Spain’s Grenada Hoy, which showed Aylan with his face digitalized beyond recognition. And in the United States, most of Aylan’s body was obscured by the Turkish officer who carried him away from the shore, as pictured in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline: “Amid Europe’s Migrant tale, a Small Horror in Turkey.”
The image of Aylan’s body was spashed across the world’s newspapers Thursday, a day after going viral in one of the most graphic examples yet of the plight of migrants and refugees trying to flee to Europe. Authorities said Aylan’s mother and brother also drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as the family tried to sail to safer shores.
The picture — the latest to shock the world of what has been described as Europe’s largest migrant crisis since World War II — hit home hardest in the Mideast, to judge by the Newseum’s daily round-up of international newspapers. Major Mideast papers published front page images of Aylan, including Israel’s Haaretz, Lebanon’s the Daily Star, Saudi Arabia’s Al Sharq, and United Arab Emirates’s Gulf News.
Front pages across Europe revealed a nuanced split. Some newspapers, like Het Nieuwsblad, Irish Examiner, and the Expressen, clearly showed Aylan, his face in the sand. Others, including De Morgen, La Vanguardia, and the Guardian, showed the body at least partly concealed by the Turkish office, or taken from a distance. The most raw was the Independent’s: The photo took up the paper’s entire front page, accompanied by the headline “Somebody’s Child.”
But American newspapers steered far clear of the most painfully poignant pictures, opting instead to use images that mostly focused on the Turkish officer. Aylan’s face and torso were obscured by front-page photos in the Journal and the Washington Post.
Documentary photographer Nina Berman, a photojournalism professor at Columbia University, said the photo raises too many moral questions for a risk-averse U.S. media establishment to accept.
“In the U.S., we tend to be a little squeamish,” Berman said. “Mainstream media has to catch up with what’s happening online — is this picture too much, is it crossing ethical lines? These questions tend to come up when the person has died.
The picture of Ayman, she said, represents “a gut punch to how cruel and dismissive society can be.”
Another U.S. photojournalist, Melissa Lyttle, echoed Berman’s opinion that U.S. publications prefer to steer clear of shocking images. “American publications more than international ones tend to shy away from dead bodies. It’s a sensitivity issue.”
But as Vox
pointed out Thursday, some newspapers’ intentions seem to have less to
do with advertising the plight of the migrants and more about societal
rubbernecking over tragedy.
British tabloid the Daily Mail
published a front page story in late July headlined “The ‘Swarm’ on Our
Streets,” featuring four photographs of migrants in various British
cities. On Thursday, the same paper struck quite a different tone, with a
full, front page picture of Aylan under the headline, “Tiny victim of a
human catastrophe.”Front page of the day: ‘Somebody’s child’ (WARNING, DISTURBING IMAGE)
I asked Poynter’s Kelly McBride and Al Tompkins about their thoughts on use of the images.
“Sometimes it’s gratuitous for the media to show images of death,” McBride said. “But sometimes it’s absolutely the most responsible thing journalists could do. Europe is in the midst of a dramatic, historical moment that will forever alter its future. The migration of refugees from the Middle East will change the continent’s identity. The image of this drowned Syrian boy is about so much more.”
“A single death,” Tompkins said, “especially when it is a child, focuses our attention in ways that groups of despairing adults may not.”
On Tuesday, Robert Mackey wrote for The New York Times about decisions in newsrooms on publishing the images.
Kim Murphy, the assistant managing editor of The Los Angeles Times for foreign and national news, said there had been a consensus among the paper’s senior editors to show the more graphic picture.Mackey spoke with Vox’s Max Fisher about why Vox didn’t run the image.
“The image is not offensive, it is not gory, it is not tasteless — it is merely heartbreaking, and stark testimony of an unfolding human tragedy that is playing out in Syria, Turkey and Europe, often unwitnessed,” she said. “We have written stories about hundreds of migrants dead in capsized boats, sweltering trucks, lonely rail lines, but it took a tiny boy on a beach to really bring it home to those readers who may not yet have grasped the magnitude of the migrant crisis.”
“I understand the argument for running the photo as a way to raise awareness and call attention to the severity of the refugee crisis, and I don’t begrudge outlets that did,” he said in an email message, “but I ultimately I decided against running it because the child in that photo can’t consent to becoming a symbol.”“Sometimes singular images become iconic to the point they spark governments to act,” Tompkins added. “We saw that in Somalia, Vietnam and even Hurricane Katrina. This may become such an image.”
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