Dennis Dunleavy

Handshakes, hugs and hoopla -- What pictures don't tell us

Photo Credit: Jim Young/Reuters

In a political cycle of relentless photo-ops, countless handshakes, hugs and flag-waving hoopla, it is refreshing to see beyond the candidates to the more human side of life. Young's picture, showing two tired children holding campaign signs in Winterset, Iowa on December 22, offers some comic relief at a time when everything we see and hear out of Iowa or New Hampshire these days seems to little more than create more apathy toward the political process. Thousands of images are transmitted to news organizations each day, but what do they really say about a candidate?

One assumption is that the pictures say very little about the candidate's ability to lead a nation. Instead, what most of the images represent are more about the what the campaigns and media thinks the audience wants to see.  At times, there is a glimpse of a human side of a candidate, but for the overwhelming majority of pictures just tastes like a spoonful of cold canned peas. The candidates attempt to project and protect his or her political image, something often proscribed by media handlers. The media, for their part, dutifully carry the message and image, out in the public domain. But increasingly, the message lands flat or is met with incredulity and suspicion.

Pictures frame, freeze and fix a moment in time -- a moment, which has traditionally been grated a lot of credit as a faithful representation of reality and truth.  In a political climate where there seems to be more similarities than differences between those seeking power in this country, pictures become a form of mind-numbing anesthesia.

The same thing could be said for other events.  How many images have we seen now of President Bush visiting the hospital beds of soldiers injured in Iraq.  Is there anything significant in Bush's patting the head of a bed-ridden Army Sgt. John Wayne Cornell of Lansing, Mich., and posing for a photo-op?


Photo Credit: White House

One way of looking at the image is that president would like us to see how much he really cares about the soldiers fighting in the Middle East.  Another way of looking at the picture is as propaganda: Go to Iraq, get hurt, get a pat on the head from the Commander-In-Chief.

It's hard not to be a little disrespectful or cynical at times when photo-ops masquerade as reality. In fact, this critique should not be viewed as another Bush-bashing ploy. It doesn't matter who's in office -- the response, and the pictures that represent the response, are almost always predictable.

A Year in Passing: Remembering some photographers who died in 2007

They may not be household names, with a few exceptions, but their contributions to photography were significant.  A young and compassionate photographer committed to giving a voice to women in times of conflict, a gutsy combat photographer who covered WII, Korea, and Vietnam, an innovator in the early days of on-location wedding portraiture, a globe-trotting freelance photographer who brought the cultures of the South Pacific into our living rooms, a museum curator who elevated photography to an art form, and the first Pulitzer Prize for photography won by an amateur.

Each year, the photography world mourns the passing of  some extraordinary individuals. This year is no exception. 

Alexandra Boulat, 45, a founding member of the photo agency VII and contributor to National Geographic, Time and Newsweek, died in October after suffering a brain aneurysm in June. Boulat is best known for her emotionally-grounded images from conflict zones such as the former Yugoslavia and Iraq.
Photo Credit: Jermone Delay/AP

Al Chang, 85, was wounded three times as a military combat photographer, while covering WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Chang later worked for the Associated Press and was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In Adam Bernstein’s obituary of Chang in the Washington Post he notes, “His work in Korea earned him a reputation as one of the Army's finest combat photographers. His images were not all stark."  Pictured here is Chang's famous Korean War image of a solider being comforted.
Photo Credit:  Al Chang (1950)

                                                 
Fred W. McDarrah, 81, was a   Veteran Village Voice photographer who captured a generation of beats, postmodernists, and the brash, from Bob Dylan to Donald Trump. From the Voice’s obit: “Over a 50-year span, McDarrah documented the rise of the Beat Generation, the city’s postmodern art movement, its off-off-Broadway actors, troubadours, politicians, agitatorsand social protests.”  See some of McDarrah's work.

Photo Credit: Janie Eisenberg

Esmond Edwards, 80, was a highly regarded photographer and jazz record producer who went on to become one of the first African-American executives in the music recording industry. In his earlier years, Edmonds made many blues and jazz record cover photographs. Here's a good example of one of Edwards' album covers for Prestige Records.

Photo Credit:  Esmond Edwards/Prestige

Jack Fields, 87, was a globe-trotting freelance photographer in the days before the term became a way of life for many photographers. For 50 years, Fields
photographed life in the South Pacific. His work appeared in Look, Life, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Collier’s Weekly. Fields broke into photography in its heyday; working along side is wife, Dorothy, a writer, to produce several books on the peoples of the South Pacific.
Photo Credit: Dorothy Fields

Arnold Hardy, 85, was the first amateur photographer to win the Pulitzer Prize for his picture of a woman falling from the Winecoff Hotel in I946. The Winecoff fire, which killed 119 people, remains the deadliest hotel fires in U.S. history. Although passionate about photography as a young man, after the fire, Hardy founded a company that built and service medical X-ray equipment based in Decatur, Geogria.

Photo Credit: Arnold Hardy

Joseph D. Jamieson, 101, was an AP photographer most noted for his images covering the Franklin Roosevelt White House years.  Jamieson began his career as a Washington Post copy boy. When he was 17-years-old Jamieson grabbed a camera to cover a fire, which landed him more assignments covering sports and features. By 1928, Jamieson had joined the Associated Press and went on to cover presidents Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt.

Photo Credit: AP/File

News of Joe O’Donnell’s death at the age of 85 has left the photojournalism community in a panic. Some obituaries, including one in the New York Times, credit O’Donnell with images he may not ever taken. For instance, a famous iconic called “John-John's salute”, claimed by O'Donnell has been shown to have been made by UPI photographer Stan Stearns.   An article in Editor & Published referred to O’Donnell as “the most famous photographer you never heard of.” Others who claim the images as their own challenged some of the photographs for sale on O’Donnell’s Website. Read the NPPA story on the controversy.

Photo Credit: The Nashville Tennessean/File

Dick Raphael, 68, will be remembered as “the dean of Boston sports photographers." In 1960, Raphael, whose work was featured in the Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated, made a historic picture of Celtic’s Bill Russell blocking a shot by Wilt Chamberlain. Another milestone in Raphael’s career is his coverage of 41 Super Bowls.

Photo Credit: John Iacono / Sports Illustrated

John Szarkowski, 81, was the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art for more than 50 years. During his career, Szarkowski is credited with “almost single-handedly” elevating photography’s status from a craft to an art form. Szarkowski championed the work of Dian Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, and many others. He also authored several important books on photography. Photo Credit: New York Times

Ernest Withers, 85, spent more than 60 years documenting the Civil Rights Movement, the Negro Baseball League, and Blue Music on Beale Street in his long-time home of Memphis.

Photo Credit: Ernest Withers (1968)

Monte Zucker, 78, was an important innovator in the field of portrait and wedding photography. With a career spanning 50 years, Zucker is known for pioneering on-location techniques in wedding portraiture. According to the Washington Post, "Mr. Zucker, who began taking wedding photographs in the late 1940s, was an authority on posing, lighting, composition and other aspects of classical photography. Some of the industry's most successful photographers employ his techniques for weddings and portraits."


Photo Credit: Monte Zucker

Nice Jubi and picturing human emotions

This year, in a refreshing way, you won't find any pictures of a sports super hero  dancing into the end zone, nor will you find pictures of the baseball steroids scandal gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated's Pictures of the Year issue. 

Instead, the popular sports magazine captures the true spirit of sport -- the jubilation of a college football player in a moment of great joy.

Photo Credit: John Russell/AP

Russell's image of Carroll University junior linebacker Brandon Day celebrating in the mud after his team won the NAIA football championship recently is a perfect example of a decisive moment. Everything, all the game action leading up Russell's picture seems inconsequential.  Not only is the moment decisive, but it is also iconic. In 1979 and 1980, tennis great Bjorn Borg went to his knees after celebrating wins at Wimbledon, and in 1999, Brandi Chastain dropped to her knees with her shirt off in celebration of the Women Soccer World Cup victory of China.

Photo Credit: Sports Illustrated

Photo Credit: AP/Via BBC

What separates these moments, as well as  firmly etches them in our collective memories, is the physical gesture of kneeling. The  emotional association  between kneeling in victory and praying cannot be missed or understated. This is what this genre of sports photography is all about -- capturing quintessential and universal gestures that every audience can relate to.  Kneeling, according to a 1912 article on medieval hymns in the New York Times, was a "manifestation of the emotions..." One picture editor's "nice jubi" is another person's quaint and self-sacrificial gesture.  Editors know that what makes people respond most are pictures that stir human emotions. That's why pictures of animals and children are perennial favorites with audiences. 

It's not surprising that Russell's image would strike a chord with the SI editors. Many of the classic visual tropes that trigger an emotional appeal are clearly present -- mud, rain, pumping fists and bended knee. 

People respond to not only context, but also aesthetic content.  In this case, what the makes the picture significant is not necessarily Carroll's victory in the NAIA championships, but the universal emotional connections made between victory and sport.   

The digital universe: The tide of the "green screen" effect on culture

Photography has always been intimately connected with the notion of modernity, realism, and Western ways of seeing.  Modernity also, as Don Slater notes in his essay "Photography and Modern Vision," makes magic disappear.  The instruments of modernity, Slater argues, demystifies and distances us from experiencing the world in our own unique way -- instead, we relie on the media to provide its own version of reality.

What seems to trouble Slater is the realization that once we substitute our own imagination and critical consciousness for resemblences and representations  something is bound to get lost.  Modernity, of which photography has played a most impressive role, Slater observes, "... Is a project of disenchantment or demythification which rigorously reduces the world to its appearance, its visible surface; it reduces both the knowable and the existent world to the observable properties (colour, mass, shape) and behaviour of material things: the world is merely matter in motion."

It is worth considering how digital photography irrevocably changes our long-standing attachment to realism. The digital universe we now inhabit feels more malleable, immediate, and often more irrational, than in the past. The digital universe is also more experimental by nature. The line between verification and falsification has become increasingly  more arbitrary and ambiguous.  We can easily rationalize our dependence upon faster, cheaper, and easier to use photographic technologies, because we have become obsessed with immediacy and instant satisfaction.

Photo Credit: Warner Bros. "300"

The "green-screen effect" on ways of seeing and believing is a paradigm shift that moves us increasingly away from realism.

Today, the digital universe encourages the "green screen" effect of knowing and experiencing the world around us. The "green screen effect" is a process where background information is later layered and superimposed upon the subject.  The digital universe and the force of the green-screen effect embodies a technological rationality that subjugates our senses and takes to, some extent the magic from the world.

   

Images, Symbols and Power

Photo Credits: Jim Cole/AP, Jose Luis Magana/AP

What can we learn from looking at pictures? The signification of these two recent images of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is striking. On the left, we see a close-up of Clinton caught in a "real" and unflattering moment, while on the right, we get what one might expect from most media managed events -- the santized moment, flags, the powerful gesture.

Human beings are symbol-making animals. We use symbols to make sense of the world and photographs increasingly contribute to meaning and consciousness. When we think of objects, ideas, and constructs, our brain transforms these things into symbols so that we can share our experiences with others. Symbols connect us through language. When we use the words such as reality, love, peace, justice, terror, poverty, pride, or patriotism, images come to mind – images associated through convention with the words we choose to describe our every day experiences. Kenneth Burke reminds us that when we think of reality, what we are relying on has been built up for us through our “symbol systems.” Burke observes, “What is our ‘reality’ for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present?”

When we view an image in the media we are given to substituting the meaning of the image with something connotative and symbolic. A presidential candidate stands before a giant American flag, which in turn produces a symbolic relationship. The candidate is by proximity of the flag immediately associated with notions of patriotism, loyalty, duty, public service and sacrifice. The flag is reduces to a backdrop – a symbol that condenses and naturalizes how the viewer should look upon the candidate. Symbolicity is emphasized through the shape, size and colors of the flag. Burke may argue that the language (words) used to describe this scene act as a sort of screen or filter on meaning.

Many years ago, in a cathedral in Texas, there was a wall covered with pictures and petitions from the faithful. The first Gulf War was underway and people used the wall as a commonplace for pictures of loved ones, alive and deceased – a symbolic collective prayer. Images hold within their frames many symbols.

Looking again at the variety of images made during Hillary Clinton's campaign stops, it is hard not to imagine the intensity and determination of the candidates as they are beseiged under the glare of the media. At the same time, we are inudated by "the clutter" of symbols and struggle to understand and draw meaning from one picture to the next.

Digital art and political consciousness in the classroom

Photo Credit: Topps Company/Collage by Matt Frederick

Former Senator George Mitchell's nearly two-year investigation into baseball's drug scandal is generating a lot of concern in the media and with the public. The 1990s, it is turning out, seems to be one of baseball's darkest eras -- greed, self-interest, and deceit.

People are responding to Mitchell's report very differently, but for students, the opportunity to find a voice through the power of digital art means the message is getting through.

Study this collage by Southern Oregon University's Digital Media Foundations student Matt Frederick. The visual metaphor resides in the progression of images illustrating Barry Bonds's presence as a public figure and role model to millions of young people. 

The story begins with a normal healthy-looking Barry Bonds the Younger, moves through to the pumped-up fleshy steroid-induced era of the 1990s, and finally rests in the irony of esmaculation and destitution. In this final scene of the triptych, Bonds' face is juxtaposed onto the withered frame of a Sudanese refugee. The message comes full circle here in all its simplicity. Digital art, in all its immediacy, takes license with reality so that people will notice the complexities and ironies of their day to day existence.

As an educator working with digital media, it is important to recognize the limitless potential new technologies afford us. With very little training, students can express themselves in new and powerful ways. I believe that part of our jobs, as educators, is to allow people to experiment with these new technologies so that they can find their voice in the world. And one of the best ways to do this is to engage students in learning the skill-sets and then just stepping out of their way as quickly as possible.

Why study attitudes toward doctoring images digitally?

Can you tell if this picture was digitally altered?

In it's second year, the annual survey on digital photo manipulation seeks the participation of photojournalists and photographers, professionals and enthusiasts, from around the world to help us understand how attitudes toward digitally altered images may be changing.

Last year, more than 745 respondents participated in the annual survey on digital photo manipulation. Part of the study seeks to clarify how photographers define photo manipulation and another part explores how attitudes toward image altering my be changing over time. The study is part of a long-term evaluation of attitudes people have toward accepting digitally altered images in the media and elsewhere.

For example when asked,  "I can tell when a photograph has been digitally altered," 42 percent of respondents (n=738) agreed or strongly agreed that they could tell the difference last year. However, 58 percent either disagreed or were undecided about whether they could tell a picture has been altered.  Could it be possible that over time, given advances in image editing software, more people will be unable to tell. The survey encourages the participation of both professionals and amateurs photographers and explores other issues such as if it is okay for images of Hollywood celebrities to be altered but not okay for images of politicians.

In terms of defining what constitutes digital photo manipulation four questions were presented:

1)  I define photo digital manipulation as changes to the content of a picture after it is made through electronic means.

2) I define photo digital manipulation as a process that helps to make the picture better aesthetically.

3) I define photo digital manipulation as a process that helps to make the objects in the picture more visually interesting.

4) I define photo digital manipulation as a process that changes the content of a picture by adding or removing visual elements from the original.

Other areas worthy of tracking over a long period of time include how photo digital manipulation is defined and whether the issue remains important in the public sphere.

More than 87 percent of respondents agreed to define photo digital manipulation as changes to the content of an image through electronic means, while 44.9 percent believed  it to be process that helps to make the objects in the picture more visually interesting. When asked if photo digital manipulation helps to make the picture better aesthetically, 37. 8 percent disagreed, 23 percent had no opinion, and 38 percent showed agreement. In the last question, "I define photo digital manipulation as a process that changes the content of a picture by adding or removing visual elements from the original," more than 85 percent expressed agreement with the statement.

Although these results do not reflect any true surprises, it is important to help clarify how people define the terms they use to describe phenomena. When polled about whether participants feel photo digital manipulation is an increasingly important issue in society today, more than 85 percent agreed that it was.

(Answer: Nothing was altered on the picture above, but it sure looks like it could be. I made this picture at a home leisure booth at a county fair and there were a lot of odd things around the girl taking a nap.)

Photography is not dead, just different

Discussions concerning photography's demise as an art form are always problematic and provocative. If we consider how digital technologies have influenced photography in the past two decades, we need to place the debate within a larger context.  Consider how painters must have felt in the mid to late 19th century when photography emerged as a viable alternative to capturing realistic representations. At that time, photography was the "new technology", which surely stirred up lots of emotion.

For centuries, painting was far from experimental. Artists were concerned, in large part, with realism -- the ability to make objects in the world appear real on a two-dimensional surface. Many portrait artists lived off the making visual likenesses of their patrons with paint on canvas. Photography's influence on painting cannot be overstated. With the invention of photography, painters were released from the constraints of realism. For example, the early impressionists of the 1860s, artists such as Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and others, were inspired by candid photography. The impressionists were able to take chances with form and style. Photography's realism filled a niche -- it was faster, less expensive, and more accessible than painting. Further, you didn't need to have extensive training in drawing and painting to produce a representation of the world around you.

Photography is not dead, it's just changing. Just the same it changed in the 19th century for traditional artists.

Today, the commonly held perception that a photograph provides a reasonable likeness to what is seen in the "real" world is changing. Digital technology, with its capacity to reconfigure reality, is viewed as a threat to the status photography once enjoyed as a form of conveyance  -- one burdened by the responsibility of being perceptually accurate.  We now have cameras that can make people look thinner, remove blemishes, correct color and tone, and sharpen the clarity of the pictures produced. Visual veracity is now in the mind of the beholder. Pictures, however, may still be worth a thousand words, but what makes the medium difference today is that the technology is increasingly able to determine what those words may mean.

Is photography losing its grip on reality?

Whoa... Newsweek's Peter Plagens is beating the photography is dead drum. Plagens' article titled "Is photography dead?"  takes the same tone we've been hearing about with photojournalism. Photoshop makes realism anachronistic.  Photography, the argument goes, has lost its way in the world -- "It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore," Plagen notes.

"Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life."

Plagen's  argument seems warranted because of photography's relationship to the apparent "real" in front of the lens. Now, with digital processes, what's set before the lens, as we are quickly discovering, is not always real at all. Nevertheless, to raise the question of photography's death is a bit of an academic cul de sac. Going in, doesn't mean you'll get very far.

The irony of art in a culture of appropriation

Appropriation artist Richard Prince has made a fortune in the art world by copying the work of other photographers in magazine advertisements and blowing the images up for exhibition. Call it post-modern whatever -- but is it art?

Randy Kennedy's article, "If the copy is an artwork, then what's the original?" in The New York Times provides insight into how photographers who have had their work ripped-off by Prince feel about appropriation as an art form. According to a blurb from Prince's exhibition now showing at the Guggenheim Museum of Art:

Prince's technique involves appropriation; he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of popular culture to create works that simultaneously embrace and critique a quintessentially American sensibility: the Marlboro Man, muscle cars, biker chicks, off-color jokes, gag cartoons, and pulp fiction.

Photo Credits: Jim Krantz (left), Richard Prince (right):The New York Times/Guggenheim Museum of Art

On the left is Jim Krantz's 1997 photograph called "Stretching Out", which was used in a Marlboro ad. To the right is Prince's appropriation of the same picture blown up to 61 x 32 inches. Nowhere does Prince credit the original work or the photographer. Perhaps one reason for this oversight is that in doing so Prince would have to share credit with the creative force he mocks in his own art.  In other words, Prince doesn't have a very high opinion of the commercial images he appropriates from magazines because he only sees this form of art as an extension of capitalism, and not as a form of expression. This then brings up the whole "high art" or "low art" debate.

What makes Prince's appropriation interesting is that the iconic nature of the Marlboro pictures signify the cultural pathology of a society obsessed with self-indulgences, individualism, identity and consumption. By appropriating the images, Prince is taking a poke at the very same "high-art" culture that is willing to fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars for his work.

Prince has taken a once negatively viewed practice, the reworking of well-known art and images, and has turned it into his own celebrated art form -- one that demands its own value as a commodity. See any irony here?

Where this practice leaves those photographers who work to produce pictures for commercial purposes is anyone's guess. However, in the end, we can assume that in the eyes of Richard Prince, the status these photographers occupy is pretty low on the food chain of public perception in terms of what counts as art in America. Yet, these are the very pictures that have shaped the culture we have today.

Jolly Old Saint Abe?

A statue of Abraham Lincoln -- an artwork that has been the frequent victim of pranksters, wears a socking cap Saturday afternoon. In recent years, the statue has had its head stolen several times. Local park boosters raised funds to have a series of more disposal plastic heads made up just in case. The statue in at the entry to Lithia Park in downtown Ashland.

Another Day, Another Slam on Journalistic Integrity

Jack Shafer's article yesterday in Slate Magazine explores the dangers publishers have been encountering with their reliance on using stock photos. Shafer points out that with today's access to web-based stock picture agencies it has become increasingly difficult to make sure the context in which pictures are used match the words. This happened recently when Nature Medicine ran a picture accompanying a story about foster children in Harlem being used as human guinea pigs for HIV drugs. The stock photo used to illustrate the article turned out to be from an orphanage in Ethiopia. Ooops. 

Photo Credit: Slate

Stuff happens, but at what cost?

In an age of instant communication, as well as the pressures of commerce, design decisions run the risk of further encouraging the common public perception that the media cares more about shock value and making money than it does about getting the story straight.  All apologies aside, the damage is what it is -- people aren't always buying into the notion that what they see and read can be trusted.
Shafer notes:

Picking the "wrong" photo for a magazine story was a lot harder back in the old days, before the Web-based photo agencies got going. The job of picking images usually went to experienced photo editors, people who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of photography and photographers. They had to assign photos or know how to find the picture they needed in the fat books of stock pix they kept on their shelves.

Gazing from space: Destractions and Detachment

Dzerzhinsk, Russia. 2006.  Photo Credit: Google Earth/Terra Images

We have become accustomed to looking at our earth from space. Seldom do we consider the remarkable significance of such perspective. The technology that makes it all possible, the aesthetics of the frame from miles above the planet, and the meaning and context of what we are privileged to view --  are all signs of things.

From the perspective of space, one might not guess that what they are looking at is a stretch of the most polluted real estate on earth -- Dzerhinsk, Russia.  Decades of industrial chemical waste makes Dzerzhinsky a toxic hell, with ground water reportedly 17 million times more contaminated than anything considered safe to consume.

Barry Lopez, in an article for National Geographic on Bernhard Edmaier's "Cold Scapes" aerial images," observes:

"The world is beautiful, in many unfathomable ways. In our hurrying through, we frequently miss what is beautiful around us, in the same way that we forget from time to time what we want our lives to mean. Just to stay afloat in the modern world, many of us reluctantly choose detachment from the constant stimulus. We even turn away from beauty, as if it were another thing we had had too much of."

Lopez is right. We have created a culture of detachment, but not just of all things beautiful. What is beautiful, for instance, about looking down omnisciently on Dzerhinsk with a god's eye knowing that human behaviors have contributed so terribly to the destruction of our enironment.

When I view, from above, the lace-like patterns of rivers swirling near Dzerhinsk against the mottled tones of greens and browns there is indeed beauty in the image. However, to simply conclude that this beauty exists without a context leaves me detached and in denial of the realities. To interpret such an image without digging deeper into the human conditions of life on the surface leads only to greater obfuscation.

 

Sidebar: Protecting journalists, lots of talk and little action

It's in the news today. The International Committee of the Red Cross on Friday said it has commitments from seven countries, including the United States, to protect journalists in war zones.

The countries are promising to educate soldiers and security forces about international humanitarian law, which ensures the safety of journalists. Ironically, while the U.S. signed on to the pledge the Committee to Protect Journalists, a non-partisan  human right organization,  found that the U.S. military is responsible for the deaths of 16 journalists in Iraq.  Spain also indicted three U.S. soldiers last April for the 2003 killing of a Spanish journalist in a Baghdad Hotel. 

This doesn't mean that the deaths of journalists at the hands of Americans are intentional.  After all, journalists are known to get in the way at times.

The big picture question to ask, then, is why now? 

Why has the Red Cross pushed for a reaffirmation of Geneva Convention guidelines on the safety of journalists?

Perhaps it is because during the past two years more than 125 journalists have been killed trying to do their jobs.

or

Perhaps, that because in 2006,  The United Nations Security Council forcefully condemned the frequency of violent attacks against journalists in many part of the world.

or (acknowledging the most cynical possibility)

Perhaps, because people just don't give a damn about the press or the media conglomerates that own the news these days. Maybe people are just to busy with their every day lives to care.  Where's the public outrage as attacks against journalists escalate?  Many people, especially younger Americans, express their distrust in the media because they see journalists as pawns of industry and government.  From this perspective, it is easy to see the cynicism  seep into public conscious.  The truth is that lots of countries will talk a great game about how they want to protect the press in conflict zones. The reality is, unfortunately, that it is very hard for them to really do anything about it.

Other links:

The Committee to Protect Journalists

Reference guide to the Geneva Conventions (SPJ)

Ex-Nightly News anchor, Tom Brokaw campaigns for free press (MSNBC)

Iraq: Journalists in Danger (CPJ)