Analyzing the AP's Pulitzer-winning photos

NOTE (added May 22): Welcome, Daily Kos readers! Really, I mean it. Thoughtful comments from any political perspective are always appreciated here.

NOTE: Welcome, LGF , Michelle Malkin, and Jawa Report readers! And thanks for the links, everybody. Also, please see the follow-ups at the end of this post.

Michelle Malkin links to this page displaying the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning photos for Breaking News Photography.

This year, the prize went to the Associated Press staff for, as the Pulitzer organization's site says, "its stunning series of photographs of bloody yearlong combat inside Iraqi cities."

I looked at the twenty photographs and broke them into groups on the basis of content. Here are my results:

    •   U.S. troops injured, dead, or mourning: 3
           (2, 3, 11)
    •   Iraqi civilians harmed by the war: 7
           (4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 18)
    •   Insurgents looking determined or deadly: 3
           (6, 15, 20)
    •   US troops looking overwhelmed or uncertain: 3
           (7, 12, 14)
    •   US troops controlling Iraqi prisoners: 2
           (16, 17)
    •   Iraqis celebrating attacks on US forces: 2
           (1, 19)

Equally telling is what the photos don't show:

    •   US forces looking heroic: 0
    •   US forces helping Iraqi civilians: 0
    •   Iraqis expressing support for US forces: 0
    •   Iraqis expressing opposition to insurgents: 0

Not only do the twenty photos consistently portray the American invasion and occupation of Iraq as an unmitigated disaster, but, as Michelle Malkin notes, at least one of them (number 20, depicting the insurgents' shocking execution of Iraqi election workers) has been exposed (by Powerline, Belmont Club, and others) as the result of at least some degree of coordination between the AP photographer and the insurgents themselves.

There hasn't been as disgraceful a Pulitzer Prize since NYT newsman Walter Duranty picked one up for sweeping Stalin's mass famines under the rug back in 1932. Shame on the Associated Press for its biased photojournalism, and shame on the Pulitzer Prize Board for "honoring" it.

FOLLOW-UP:
In the comments, Dave Justus from Justus for All notes that some people are skeptical as to whether picture 20 was the result of coordination between the photographer and the insurgents. Regardless, it still depicts the war as an out-of-control disaster.

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
A number of people, on this site and others, have argued that photos 7 and 12 do not show U.S. troops looking "overwhelmed or uncertain". Perhaps a better description would have been U.S. troops "under attack by, or searching for, insurgents".

Other people have taken issue with my contention that none of the photos show U.S. troops "looking heroic". It should go without saying (but apparently it didn't) that I think the act of serving our country in Iraq is heroic in and of itself. A better description here might have been "U.S. troops on the offensive" — in other words, shown in the bold, almost romanticized way the insurgents are depicted in photos 6 and 15.

YET ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
Even in battles where our troops suffered terrible losses, the AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs weren't always so negative.