A photograph of a father and his young daughter who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into America is causing emotional outcry among the left, helped along by supposedly objective journalists including the New York Times, which put it on top of the front page of its Wednesday print edition. It’s an interesting choice for the paper, which tends to refrain from such graphic imagery, especially on the front page.
While the original print version story about the tragedy was penned solely by reporter Mihir Zaveri, an updated version with more sentiment and emotional opinionizing was credited to Zaveri and reporter Kirk Semple: “Photo of Drowned Migrants Captures Pathos of Those Who Risk It All.”
The rewrite piled on the emotion:
The father and daughter lie face down in the muddy water along the banks of the Rio Grande, her tiny head tucked inside his T-shirt, an arm draped over his neck.
The portrait of desperation was captured on Monday by the journalist Julia Le Duc, in the hours after Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez died with his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, as they tried to cross from Mexico to the United States.
The image represents a poignant distillation of the perilous journey migrants face on their passage north to the United States, and the tragic consequences that often go unseen in the loud and caustic debate over border policy.
"Unseen" during the Obama administration certainly, though there were deaths during such crossings in the eight years of the Obama administration as well, though lacking the front pages featuring photos of the dead.
It recalled other powerful and sometimes disturbing photos that have galvanized public attention to the horrors of war and the acute suffering of individual refugees and migrants -- personal stories that are often obscured by larger events.
Like the iconic photo of a bleeding Syrian child pulled from the rubble in Aleppo after an airstrike or the 1993 shot of a starving toddler and a nearby vulture in Sudan, the image of a single father and his young child washed up on the Rio Grande’s shore had the potential to prick the public conscience.
Which is why the Times placed the Associated Press's photograph so prominently in print.
As the photo ricocheted around social media on Tuesday, Democrats in the House were moving toward approval of an emergency $4.5 billion humanitarian aid bill to address the plight of migrants at the border.
Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas and the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus, grew visibly emotional as he discussed the photograph in Washington. He said he hoped that it would make a difference among lawmakers and the broader American public.
Last year, The New York Times Magazine carried an article on how the press went light on showing photographs of dead American soldiers, but noticed the Times did put a dead body on the front page....when it was Michael Brown, the inspiration for riots in Ferguson, Missouri.
Semple has previously cheerleaded for illegal immigration, to the extreme of citing the plight of human smugglers. The illegal immigration will not stop:
For all the hard-line policies, hundreds of thousands of migrants continue to embark on the dangerous journey to the United States from Central America and elsewhere.
But for every migrant who chooses to take the journey, whether on foot, packed into cargo trucks or on the top of trains, the fear of what lies behind outweighs that which lies ahead.
But after stoking "fear," the Times admitted these particular victims weren’t refugees:
Some are fleeing gangs that cripple the region and kill wantonly. Others are seeking an economic lifeline.
Such was the case with Mr. Martínez and his wife, who left El Salvador in early April intent on starting fresh in the United States....
