At Poynter, Kenny Irby has a tick-tock about how the Seattle Times came to run the Tami Silico photo.

Seattle Times Assistant Managing Editor/Visuals & Technology Heidi de Laubenfels says that [picture editor Barry] Fitzsimmons was instrumental at "bringing others into the conversation and, as a consequence, deciding to wait and take a deliberate approach to publishing the photo. The newspaper's approach became about much more than just the photo. It was about the journalism, and what it would take to present this in the proper context. That led to the relationship-building that Barry did with Tami and Amy [Katz], and it led to the solid reporting that Hal Bernton did to accompany the image with a story that talked about why she would take the picture and why it mattered." ...

"The original intent was that, for us, we had a photograph on its merit but we would not run it without the proper context and we had to report that out. We needed to have the proper context and Barry (Fitzsimmons) tracked down Tami in Kuwait," explained [Times director of photography Cole] Porter, a 30-year veteran photojournalist.

"I have never seen a situation quite like this and I am proud of how our paper handed this case," Porter says. "Our process was very thoughtful and reflective, our actions were appropriate. I am very pleased with our thoughtfulness."

>Women Responsible for Coffin Image Reunite [Poynter Online]
>Design Desk: It's a Great Image. Now What? [Poynter Online]

Charles Paul Freund has a fine piece at Reason Online about the complexities of controlling war images and the public's reaction to them. A lot of the discussion about the Dover photos seems to hinge upon the speaker's personal opinion of the war and how release/suppression of such photos will bring the public around to their point of view. This is rather simplistic, as Freud points out. For the first two years of World War II, the government suppressed all documentary images of American death, just as they had in World War I, for fear such images would demoralize the public and erode support for the war. But by 1943, they decided the public had grown complacent about the war and released many images of American dead to shore up support and drive home the point that the war was far from won.

There is, of course, an apparent contradiction between these two approaches. If FDR's original view was valid—that death images would demoralize the public—then displaying it in the latter part of the war (when the vast majority of U.S. war deaths occurred) risked undermining the American military's demands for unconditional surrender, at least in Europe. If his later, revised view was correct—that death imagery would increase public fervor—then displaying them in the first, dark months of the war might well have helped counteract the effect of so much negative military news. (As it happens, "Noble Sacrifice" against great odds was the underlying theme of many early Hollywood war movies.)

There is an obvious third proposition: Neither of these generalizations about the effect of death imagery was necessarily correct. While there is often a plain and unchanging personal meaning in such images of death, there is no inevitable political meaning in them; rather, their political meaning and impact can change according their context. The most important factor in that context is probably not whether a given conflict appears to be going well, but whether the viewer of such images believes the war's cause to be just, and its pursuit purposeful. If you believe that about the Iraq war, then you probably interpret the coffin images a certain way; if you don't, you probably see a different picture.

Hiding such imagery, as many administrations have done, is in the end an act of self-defeating censorship, one that raises questions about the state's view of the citizens it is sending to war, and potentially about the state's view of the war itself. However, disseminating such images as an act of war criticism is reductionist and prone to backfire, because such an act seeks to impose a single political meaning on images whose meaning is changing and fluid. Whether such images portray honorable sacrifice or something very different depends on how the viewers of the images perceive the war itself, and not, as some involved in this debate seem to believe, the other way around.

In the foreign press, Asahi Shimbun, Medellin's El Colombiano, Folha de Sao Paulo, Der Tagesspiegel, Beirut's An Nahar, El Pais, The London Daily Telegraph and Porto Algre's Zero Hora ran Dover military photos on the front page. In the U.S., 16 papers decided they missed the boat yesterday and one ran another one for good measure: Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Burlington Free Press, Columbus Dispatch, Charlotte Observer, Dayton Daily News, The Oklahoman, The Desert Sun, Greensburg Tribune-Review, Lawrence Journal World, The Harrisburg Patriot-News, Portland Press Herald, Salt Lake Tribune, The Toledo Blade, The Lakeland Ledger, The Times-Picayune, The Roanoke Times and Tacoma News Tribune (again!).

The Boston Globe may have a scoop today. They appear to be alone in reporting that the Pentagon will review the policy that bans photography when soldiers' remains are returned to the U.S., and that White House support for the ban may be getting a bit squishy.

Aides to Bush said yesterday that he was shown the images and found them to be an important "reminder of the sacrifice" made by US troops. Nevertheless, White House officials repeated their support for the ban, which they say respects the privacy of the soldiers' families.

But yesterday it appeared they would not rule out dropping or changing it if political pressure mounts. Asked directly whether Bush's message is that the ban will be maintained, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said, "The message is that the sensitivities and the privacy of the families of the fallen must be the first priority."

Some of the photos from Dover AFB released to The Memory Hole included images of the coffins of the Columbia astronauts arriving at the base in February 2003. The Department of Defense did not differentiate these photos from those of soldiers' coffins. Nicole comments in the previous post:

I wish I could find a better source for which coffin photos are the Columbia ones. I'd be interested to know if there are any that ran on covers, now that we know which papers ran the photos.

>DOD Misidentifies Photos of Columbia Crew Remains Arriving at Dover AFB as Being Iraq War Dead [SpaceRef.com]
>Dover AFB gallery [The Memory Hole]
>Dover AFB gallery mirror site [Warblogging.com, via Elisabeth Donovan]

Looks like about 23 of 179 American newspapers on the Newseum used a military coffins photo on the front page today: Boston Globe, New York Daily News, Colorado Springs Gazette, Cedar Rapids Gazette, New York Times, Wilmington News Journal, Tacoma News Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Seattle Post-Intellegencer, St. Petersburg Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, L.A. Times and Dallas Morning News (no link).

The Anchorage Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Hackensack Record and Chicago Sun-Times ran the Tami Silicio photo, and the Seattle Times fronted a story about the Memory Hole FOIA release, but ran no photos on the front.

Update: It will also be the lead photo on Saturday's International Herald Tribune.

Update v2.0: I've given the pages new links that won't be rotten by Saturday. Also clarified what some papers ran and added a couple.

The Dover photos have hit the wire, along with a Bill Carter NYT piece. Not on the website yet. It says the Pentagon "labeled the decision to grant the [FOIA] request a mistake." Here's the traditional-media-drops-the-ball-internet-runs-with-it angle that will doubtless echo across the net tomorrow:

Executives at news organizations, many of whom have protested the policy [of banning photography of war dead at Dover], said Thursday night they had not known that the Defense Department itself was taking photographs of the coffins arriving home, a fact that only came to light when Russ Kick, the operator of The Memory Hole filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

"We were not aware at all that these photos were being taken," said Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times.

John Banner, the executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight," said, "We did not file a FOIA request ourselves, because this was the first we had known that the military was shooting these pictures."

Update: As of the 7:30 ET advisory, this story was planned for downpage A1 of the Times. Also, as Aaron Brown just showed, it will be the A1 centerpiece of the Philly Inquirer.

Update: The WaPo's story, skedded for A10, is here. And the Times story is now here.

>Photos of Soldiers' Coffins Revive Controversy [The Washington Post]
>Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken [The New York Times]

In the wake of the Silicio firing, there's more bad PR for the government. In what's developing into something of a perfect storm for photos of military coffins, The Memory Hole received the results of an FOIA request for photos of military coffins at Dover Air Force Base. The site now has a gallery of 361 photos. The administration will probably take a bigger PR hit on this than if they'd just allowed photos in the first place.

>Photos of Military Coffins (Casualties From Iraq) at Dover Air Force Base [The Memory Hole]

The Seattle Times says they're sorry Tami Silicio was fired, but that she knew the risks.

In several e-mails and telephone conversations, [photo editor Barry] Fitzsimmons told Silicio that publishing the photograph -- which depicts more than 20 coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers loaded on a cargo plane at Kuwait International Airport -- could bring repercussions.

But Silicio insisted that the Times run the photo to show the tremendous respect given to the soldiers' remains as they were loaded onto the plane for the trip home.

Despite Silicio's firing, the Times doesn't regret publishing the picture. "It is certainly unfortunate that she got fired but she was fully aware of that possibility beforehand," Managing Editor David Boardman told E&P.

Katz is not sorry, either. "I absolutely have no regrets," she said. "The support I've received from the media and the public has been overwhelming."

An alert reader informs us that Tami Silicio, the contract worker who took the photo on the front page of Sunday's Seattle Times, has been fired.

Silicio was let go yesterday for violating U.S. government and company regulations, said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the contractor that employed Silicio at Kuwait International Airport.

"I feel like I was hit in the chest with a steel bar and got my wind knocked out. I have to admit I liked my job, and I liked what I did," Silicio said.

>Woman loses her job over coffins photo [Seattle Times]
>Images of war dead a sensitive subject [Seattle Times]

Yes, it's from yesterday, but it's just a helluva photo. It was taken by Tami Silicio, a contract employee from the Seattle area who works in the cargo terminal of the U.S. military area at Kuwait International Airport.

Executive Editor Michael Fancher wrote about the photo in Sunday's paper.

When the photo arrived, "I just said wow," [Seattle Times photo editor Barry] Fitzsimmons recalls. "The picture was something we don't have access to as the media," and yet it seemed undeniably newsworthy.

What the caller had was the picture on today's front page. It shows rows of flag-draped military coffins inside an airplane in Kuwait. These were America's war dead on their way home at a moment when U.S. troops are experiencing their deadliest month of the war.

Fitzsimmons felt the picture should be published, but "it's too powerful an image just to drop into the newspaper." The Times would first need to learn the story behind it.

Leon Espinoza, news editor, had the same reaction. "The photo without question is a very powerful image, one seldom seen. It shows the great care taken to honor the fallen soldiers, and it can't help but show the toll a war takes.

"It's a photo that demands context. The photo needs to be viewed in context of the story behind it, a story the picture — as powerful as it is — can only partly tell. Simply put, we need to show the whole picture, and getting the story right is essential to doing that," Espinoza said. ...

... Readers likely will have differing reactions to the photo, depending on their views of the war.

"It's a photo that evokes an emotional response and one that people are sure to see through their own filters, political or otherwise," said Espinoza, who is responsible for the Sunday front page.

>Powerful photograph offered chance to tell an important story [The Seattle Times]
>The somber task of honoring the fallen [The Seattle Times]