Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. A former journalist, Zelizer has authored or edited seven books, including the award-winning Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory and Journalism After September 11. Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy and Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime will be published in 2004. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Freedom Forum Center Research Fellowship, Zelizer is also a media critic, whose work on cultural memory, journalism, and images has appeared in The Nation, the Jim Lehrer News Hour, Newsday, and Radio National of Australia. While at the Shorenstein Center she will be writing a book on about-to-die photographs in contemporary U.S. journalism.
Death in Wartime: Photographs and the “Other War” in Afghanistan
January 1, 2005
A paper by Barbie Zelizer, spring 2004 fellow, addresses the formulaic dependence of the news media on images of people facing impending death. Considering one example of this depiction – U.S. journalism’s photographic coverage of the killing of the Taliban by the Northern Alliance during the war on Afghanistan – the paper traces its strategic
