In a series of three essays published in 1991, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that the Gulf War, which ended up with more than a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, had not really taken place. In his inimitable fashion, his argument was filled with internal contradictions, annoying trolling (Baudrillard had initially written that the Gulf War would never actually happen, which, of course, it did), and some pockets of real clarity. His ultimate argument was that what had taken place wasn’t so much a war but a one-sided aerial slaughter that was scrubbed clean through intensive media control. What people in the West saw were so-called live feeds of missiles and aerial assaults fuelled by new forms of technology, whether the Patriot missile or the stealth bomber. The war was communicated to us almost like an advertisement for a new car—here are all the new features, and here are the salesmen in the form of generals or foreign-policy experts paraded on cable news. We did not see slain enemy combatants, destroyed civilian homes.
If the Gulf War was a slaughter sold to the American public as a clean military-technology show, the war in Gaza has been a production line of horrifying images. The footage of dead and wounded children, particularly on social media, has traumatized the world and made it clear that nothing—not even the Israeli military tightly controlling media access—can stop ordinary citizens around the world from seeing what happens when a shell hits a hospital or a school or an apartment building where families live. My guess is that this war’s lasting legacy may not be some geopolitical break after years of conflict but the images of the innocents we’ve seen, including children, killed in almost every imaginable way.
There should be no moral squishiness about any of this. If children are being slaughtered, if a father is carrying his dead daughter through a bombed-out street, or if there is footage of dead children in southern Israel, which, for now, seems to have been shown mostly in a selective way through screenings by the Israel Defense Forces, the world, at large, should see that.
Here in the United States, we have our own procession of dead children, but they’re almost all unseen. The victims of mass shootings in schools leave behind a spectral trail. We do not see their deaths; we do not see the agony of a parent holding their child’s lifeless body. Instead, we see the surrounding context—surveillance footage of the shooter stalking through the hallways of a school, the smiling school photos of the murdered child, the brave parents speaking in shaky voices at a press conference, the faces of law-enforcement officers providing nighttime updates on the death toll. These scenes have become so familiar that they feel like studio sets for a television show we watch over and over again. In the first act, we see the aerial shots of the school. Then we are on the grounds with the shooter. And here is the local chief of police, his face overly lit from a crowd of news cameras, each with its own little spotlight, grimly updating the nation.
This show does not trade in clean advertisements in the Baudrillardian sense, but its recurrence and its familiarity draw more attention to the bodies we don’t see. We are left to imagine the scene inside a classroom. Every time I hear about a shooting at a school, I picture my own children looking up with surprise as the gunman walks through the door. But our imaginations tend to stop short, in part because the vast majority of us have never seen actual carnage. If the parents are willing, and believe that their child’s death can spark the outrage needed to produce an outcome that would stop or reduce these mass shootings, should we see these dead children in the same way that we have seen the dead children of Gaza? One does not have to agree upon what the solution might be—gun control or early psychiatric interventions or whatever else—to understand the calculation here. It is similar to the decision Mamie Till made when she insisted upon an open-casket funeral for her son, Emmett, saying, “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.”
Earlier this month, the Washington Post published a lengthy multimedia story titled “Terror on Repeat: A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings,” which includes photos from mass shootings that the vast majority of the public has never seen before. We see the bullet-ridden walls of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a prayer book with a bullet hole found in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, a shattered glass wall at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the blood-streaked floors of a classroom at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.
In a note that accompanies the story, Sally Buzbee, the newspaper’s executive editor, writes that “the goal was to balance two crucial objectives: to advance the public’s understanding of mass killers’ increasing use of this readily available weapon, which was originally designed for war, while being sensitive to victims’ families and communities directly affected by AR-15 shootings.”
But these images have also been edited, vetted, and responsibly published through an institutional process that included, in Buzbee’s words, grappling “with our own standard practices when it comes to publishing graphic content” and “training by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma,” which conferred “best practices for viewing disturbing photos and discussing how publishing them could affect readers.” What this means is that the Post’s story tightens the focus on all the areas surrounding the images of dead children—the bloody floor of a classroom in Uvalde—but for the most part still does not show the bodies themselves.
There are two notable exceptions. From the mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas, we see dozens of dead people lying on the ground. In a hallway at Robb Elementary, a photo shows two lines of white body bags. The latter image is stunning, and there is an argument to be made that the body bags are enough to convey the horror and to fully portray the destruction of these mass shootings. The anonymity the bags confer and the blankness of white allow the viewer to imagine what’s inside without any intervening politics or prejudices or narratives. The brightly painted hallway—lime green and light blue—could be at any elementary school in America. The white bags could contain anyone’s children. The anonymity is universal, and the mind is drawn immediately to the other white body bags we have seen since October 7th.
And yet I do not know if these images are enough. This is not through any fault of the Post, which should be credited for its exhaustive, original reporting. But because it is an institution that must be careful and must reflect the recommendations of other institutions, such as the Dart Center, the decision about publishing traumatic imagery will always be processed through existing standards and consensus. Part of that calculus involves assessing the images’ journalistic value, which, in this case, was to show the “devastation caused by AR-15 shootings.” The specificity of that framing might give it more political power, but it also feels slightly—and I do mean slightly—disingenuous. Are we really seeing all these images of carnage as a way to talk about the AR-15? Perhaps, but I imagine the Post also understands that the horror of the images extends well beyond the debate over one specific weapon of war.
In an excellent column in the New York Times about a photograph of six dead children in Gaza, Lydia Polgreen writes, “The news media no longer needs to disseminate an image for it to be seen. Social media bludgeons us with a flood of brutal images.” Polgreen points to a discomforting probability: when the world ultimately sees the images of dead children in a school shooting in the United States, it will likely come via social media and be taken by someone who was inside the school, or, perhaps more ghoulishly, the shooters themselves. The dam—which currently is held in place by the standards of news organizations and by law-enforcement organizations who, for understandable reasons, have tightly guarded these crime-scene photos—will inevitably break. At some point, we will see these children, and journalists will then be faced with the question of whether they should offer up a more sanitized version of what the rest of the world has already seen.
In her editor’s note, Buzbee mentions that the Post talked to families of the victims, some of whom were willing to grant permission to publish photographs of their dead relatives. But the paper ultimately decided that “the potential harm to victims’ families outweighed any potential journalistic value of showing recognizable bodies.” This is a perfectly acceptable decision, but one that prompts a broader question about whether it will be these institutional processes—and institutions—that ultimately arbitrate what is and isn’t made visible. There is also the question of why the Post would set aside the consent of victims’ families to protect them from the potential harm of what they had agreed to do.
The arguments against facilitating such a voluntary exposure are certainly compelling. A family who agreed to have the image of their murdered child published would be opening themselves up to the public in an excruciating manner. They might also retraumatize the families of other victims. There also is a legitimate concern about privacy that a dead child can no longer demand. But I also think that it’s worth thinking pragmatically, if such a word can be used in this context. Images of dead children have great emotional and political power because most people in the world rightfully agree that their deaths are intolerable. The taboo on showing the aftermath of this violence does not exist as merely some marker of civilized society—of good taste. It comes from those who, for whatever reason, are squeamish about putting names and faces to the escalating body count, who want to keep everything abstract. This isn’t limited just to gun manufacturers or to their lobbies or to politicians defending the Second Amendment but extends to just regular parents who would rather not fixate on something that’s probably not going to happen at their kid’s school.
The past six weeks have made it clear that the world will respond to images of slaughtered children, and it’s worth asking why it’s taken this long for people to see what that looks like. There is no question that images of dead children carry an immense amount of weight, which, in turn, must be handled responsibly. But that does not mean that any attempt to get the public to see them is automatically manipulative or propagandistic. It is far more manipulative to edit out the dead children or to hide them under a veil of solemnity and manners. ♦
