The Power Joe Rosenthal Knew

[spindrifter]

By Susan D. Moeller
Saturday, August 26, 2006

"Correspondents have a job in war as essential as the military personnel," wrote Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in a memorandum drafted in the worrisome days before the Normandy invasion. "Fundamentally, public opinion wins wars." One of the greatest weapons in the World War II arsenal turned out to be a photograph -- the image taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal of five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising the flag over Iwo Jima.

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Countless publications duplicated the image. It was reproduced on a postage stamp, made into a statue, copied on untold numbers of commemorative items and turned into a Hollywood movie plot. Joe Rosenthal's photograph not only gave Americans back home an image of what was happening on the front lines, it persuasively argued that Americans were winning.

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Managing images to elicit a supportive public opinion in wartime was understood as essential long before the World War II -- it's simply the method of management that has changed. Napoleon III, during his mid-19th century reign in France, censored caricature more harshly than the written word -- in a time of low literacy, political cartoons were intelligible to all. Famed World War I photographer Jimmy Hare, who took pictures of the dead on the Italian front, wrote about being more stymied by the censors than were his reporter colleagues, and noted that "to so much as make a snapshot without official permission in writing means arrest."

In 1965 CBS correspondent Morley Safer enraged the military and the Johnson administration by showing footage of Marines burning thatched roofs of the village of Cam Ne with Zippo cigarette lighters. Although similar reports had been routinely documented in the print media, the visual effect of the television coverage so irritated President Lyndon Johnson that he is said to have awakened Frank Stanton, president of CBS News, with the demand "Are you trying to me?"

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082500939.html