Covering the dead

This paper explores the meeting point of photojournalism and death and maps the tensions involved. Most of the literature on news-media and death explores the problematics of covering death during wartime. Less attention has been given to violent death in civic settings (as opposed to war zones) and to mundane deaths. The civic death scenes are not subject to military or governmental censorship, and the moral and professional burden to report such events falls on the journalists' shoulders. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the representation of death in Israeli news-media. Findings from interviews and a quantitative content analysis shed light on journalistic practices, and show how the news-media self-regulate their working practices. Lastly, the paper identifies breakdowns of this self-regulated mechanism as it points at two different approaches to presenting death images according to the national affiliation of the dead. The paper argues that these practices delineate and maintain the distinction between Israelis and "the Other".