Meme: Passion Quilt

Re: Elrod Tag.
Hope I did all this right. Mark took my tags.

Rules: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

Give your picture a short title.

Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.”

Title: A Voice for the Voiceless

A controversial photo for a controversial subject. The picture was taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter in 1993. The photo depicts a starving Sudanese girl hunched over in fatigue on her way to a feeding station. The reality of the situation in the Sudan was driven home by the expectant vulture in the background. Carter said the child eventually moved on towards the feeding station, and he shooed off the bird. The photo won Carter the Pulitzer Prize; it's one of the most recognized Pulitzer winners that I reference in class. A few months after his win, partially because of the horrors he'd seen, Carter committed suicide.

I developed my title long before I settled on a picture after being tagged. The picture had (has) an immediate and palpable effect on those who'd seen it splashed across the New York Times in '93. The Times, in its obituary, said Carter's image became "metaphor for Africa's despair." The photo highlighted the realities of famine (and, by extension, Sudan's civil war) for countries unaware of the plague. When I teach Editing for Print Media, this is one of about a dozen photos I ask students to decide whether or not they would run in their newspaper — the main criterion being its newsworthiness. They have unanimously seen its power to inform.

The thought of giving voice to the voiceless is what originally drew me into journalism. Protection under the First Amendment gives journalists a mandate to protect the governed from the governing. I stress this responsibility to every class I instruct. Information is essential to people as they shape, understand and react to their world. Journalists should, and some do, provide this service to their communities. This picture brought a new world to the world at large. Words have a similar power. Whether it be through stories on civil rights in the 1960s, slavery in the 1800s, presidential malfeasance in the 1970s and 1990s or storm relief in the 2000s, journalists have empowered their world by bringing to light things many preferred kept in the dark.

-sidenote-
My students and I are lucky to have such a power afforded us. Press atrocities occur far too often internationally. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists the number of journalists killed in Iraq at 127 (the vast majority of them Iraqi). Journalists have routinely been jailed in Iran, Cuba and this year's Olympic host, China. It takes a free press to bring these atrocities to light, and it takes an informed people to bring about the necessary change.
-end sidenote-

It is a time of change, but I am cautiously optimistic (which, if you are a journalist, is the only way to be optimistic) that the traditional ideas I have written about will be sustained. In this age of traditional media downturn, the press has become the computer screen you read this on now. The responsibility remains.