01 July 2019 - The Guardian criticised for publishing photo of drowned migrants without appropriate warning
Shocking photo of drowned father and daughter highlights migrants' border peril
Includes graphic images, viewer discretion advised
Patrick Timmons in Piedras Negras, Martin Hodgson in New York, and David Agren in Mexico City (The Guardian, 26/06/2019)
The grim reality of the migration crisis unfolding on America’s southern border has been captured in photographs showing the lifeless bodies of a Salvadoran father and his daughter who drowned as they attempted to cross the Rio Grande into Texas.
The images, taken on Monday, show Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 26, and his daughter Valeria, lying face down in shallow water. The 23-month-old toddler’s arm is draped around her father’s neck, suggesting that she was clinging to him in her final moments.
The UN refugee agency compared the photograph to the 2015 image of thethree-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi who drowned off the Greek island of Kos – although it remains to be seen if it will have the same impact on America’s fierce immigration debate.
The Image America Shouldn’t Need
Includes graphic images, viewer discretion advised
Tina Vasquez (The New York Review of Books, 27/06/2019)
The photo is inescapable. First published by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada and later by the Associated Press, it quickly circulated on social media. Not long after, the image flashed across television stations and news sites around the country. By Wednesday morning, it was on the front page of The New York Times.
The image shows the bodies of twenty-five-year-old Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, who was almost two years old. On the banks of the Rio Grande river, they were captured by journalist Julia Le Duc in a final embrace. They died migrating.
According to Le Duc, Martínez, his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, and their daughter Valeria had begun migrating to the United States from El Salvador. They’d been in Tapachula in southern Mexico, where they applied for humanitarian visas that would have allowed them to stay and work in Mexico for a year.
Should the media publish graphic news images?
Includes graphic images, viewer discretion advised
Mike Bebernes (Yahoo News, 29/06/2019)
What's happening: A photograph of a father and his young daughter who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande into the United States sparked anguish and outrage around the world this week. The image, taken by journalist Julia Le Duc, shows the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his young daughter, Valeria, face down in the water and underscored the dangers migrants encounter when attempting to enter the U.S. The pair were fleeing violence in their home country of El Salvador, according to the Associated Press.
The image also led to a debate about the decision by news organizations to publish the painful photo. Several outlets felt compelled to publish posts from top editors explaining their choice to do so. (Yahoo News chose to publish the photograph for its news value on a story of public importance.) A similar conversation arose in 2015 around a photograph of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe with his family.
The Guardian was right to use a graphic image – but lessons have been learned
Paul Chadwick (The Guardian, 30/06/2019)
"It is the visual stories that have staying power,” a picture editor once wrote. From time to time an image condenses a public issue into human form so powerfully that it becomes both messenger and symbol. The latest is last week’s photograph of the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, floating face-down near the bank of the Rio Grande, on the US-Mexico border.
The child’s arm, draped across her father’s neck, emerges from inside his shirt, where presumably he had tried to secure her. It gives the image a potent poignancy. “The tenderness, the way he never let her go. You can see the way he protected her,” said Rosa Ramírez, his mother in El Salvador, from where Martínez, his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, and their daughter had begun their attempt to reach the US.