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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Syria, Zimbabwe and the Philippines.

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How Well Has The Times Advanced a Story That It Didn’t Break?

The New York Times did not break the story that has dominated national security news all summer: revelations of widespread surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. I explored the reasons for that in a recent Sunday column.

But how well has The Times done in covering or advancing that story since it first appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post? Is The Times holding its own, gaining or losing ground, and how hard is the paper of record pushing, on this extremely important story?

I’ll offer some initial observations, in what may turn out to be a continuing consideration of that question:

1. The Times has broken some notable stories of its own and provided some good analysis. The lead story on Wednesday’s front page, by the prolific Charlie Savage, was an example of this, describing how the federal government is developing facial scanning techniques to enhance the surveillance of the future. An earlier story by Mr. Savage, also on the front page, reported that the N.S.A. is not just intercepting e-mail but is “searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.” It moved the story forward significantly. Eric Lichtblau reported in July on th power and secrecy of the nation’s surveillance court, contributing a new, important angle. And a valuable analysis piece by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane provided perspective.

In addition, Peter Maass’s article on Sunday in The Times Magazine on the video journalist Laura Poitras gave a frightening glimpse of the intimidation brought to bear on those involved in breaking the N.S.A. story.

2. Less positively, The Times sometimes has played down the importance of other papers’ reporting on this subject. One example came last week. The Times rewrote a Washington Post blockbuster story on the N.S.A.’s breaking of federal privacy rules, but then buried it in a one-column format on Page A12. The underplaying of a competitor’s story is nothing new in journalism but unfortunate nonetheless, given what’s at stake for citizens.

In fairness, the story did get good display on The Times’s home page when it first broke, and it got a one-sentence mention on the front page of the paper, referring readers to the article inside.

3. On some occasions, The Times has seemed less than intensely interested in the developing story and its ramifications. I wrote recently, for example, about The Times’s exclusive interview with President Obama, a 40-minute session in which â€" astonishingly, in my view â€" no surveillance issues were raised.

In addition, the articles about the British government’s intrusions into press freedom â€" including the appalling destruction of The Guardian’s hard drives â€" were well written by the London bureau chief Steven Erlanger but played on inside pages of the paper. The headline on one of them, “British Newspaper Has Advantages in Battle With Government Over Secrets,” seemed to miss the larger point of what had happened. One reader, Jim Michie, was angry about The Times’s “superficial” treatment of the British assault on the press and wrote to me calling The Times’s quiet coverage “amazing and disgraceful.”

4. While The Guardian and The Washington Post have maintained their edge, continuing to break stories, other news organizations who came in later than The Post and The Guardian are digging up other angles: The Wall Street Journal got in the game Wednesday, leading its front page with a story that said the N.S.A. is reaching 75 percent of Americans’ Internet communications. And NBC News on Wednesday had a report that an “overwhelmed” N.S.A. still doesn’t know the extent of what Edward J. Snowden took from the agency. The NBC report was widely picked up elsewhere.

And notably, it was not a mainstream news organization like The Times, but a free speech and privacy rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sued to obtain the court ruling that made front-page news on Thursday: A federal judge in 2011 found that N.S.A. surveillance had violated the United States Constitution.

I asked Dean Baquet, the managing editor at The Times, to respond to these observations. He told me that he thinks The Times has done a good job of advancing the story and disagrees that it has played down the stories of its competitors. “Once you get past the first stories by The Guardian and The Post, no one has broken more ground than we have,” he said, admitting that the first stories were by far the most significant.

He disagreed with the premise that The Times’s interest has been anything less than intense. “We reacted the way you’re supposed to react when you get scooped,” he said. “They beat us, that’s life. We’ve followed it and we’ve had some significant stories.”

I’ve heard a great deal from Times readers on this subject. Here are two e-mails â€" making quite different points â€" that give a sense of a frustrated tone that is becoming familiar to me on this subject.

John Shepard of Horsham, Pa., who describes himself as “an old soldier and defense contractor,” wrote that he would like to read deeper, more explanatory coverage of the surveillance revelations: “As a regular online reader of The Times, I find that something has been missing from the reporting on the materials leaked by Edward Snowden over the past few weeks. Much of the reporting â€" both in The Times and other media â€" has focused on Snowden, his statements, his movements and his travel status. Little, at least that I have seen, has been said about the materials Snowden has released.” He described himself as tired of the “hyperventilation” and looking for deeper answers from The Times.

And George Hickey, “a decades-long fan” of The Times, wrote that he had become disenchanted: ”The New York Times today is not The New York Times of the Pentagon Papers era. Although The Times still does good journalism you have lost a good deal of courage and are much too compliant with government demands/requests to be completely trusted. The American government is creating a police state and you are not resisting nearly enough.”

Mr. Baquet took issue with Mr. Hickey’s statement when I read it to him, calling it “an unfair criticism,” and pointing to a number of stories in recent years â€" including many disclosures from WikiLeaks â€" that have shown the paper’s willingness to push back against the government.  He also noted that it was The Times, in 2005, that broke the original story, by James Risen and Mr. Lichtblau, of a government spying on its citizens in the Pulitzer-winning story about warrantless wiretapping. It took courage to print that, he noted, even considering the much-criticized long delay while The Times considered the government’s request not to publish.

So this is a mixed report. But like many readers, I would like to see a greater and more consistent sense of urgency reflected on The Times’s news pages in dealing with this subject, which has such profound implications for civil liberties, for press freedom, for the privacy of American citizens and for democracy.  This story is not going away. Given The Times’s resources and reporting talent, there’s still plenty of opportunity to make up ground.



The Soldier Formerly Known as Bradley Manning

Pfc. Bradley Manning told the world on Thursday that he wants to be a woman and wishes to be known from now on as Chelsea Manning.

The development sent Times editors scrambling to their stylebooks and to past articles on other transgender cases of well-known people for guidance. But there is no precise comparison, given the extraordinary prominence of the United States Army soldier who was sentenced to 35 years in prison this week for his leaking of documents.

Here is the entry on it from The Times’s “Manual of Style and Usage,” a guidebook used by reporters and editors throughout the newsroom:

transgender (adj.) is an overall term for people whose current identity differs from their sex at birth, whether or not they have changed their biological characteristics. Cite a person’s transgender status only when it is pertinent and its pertinence is clear to the reader. Unless a former name is newsworthy or pertinent, use the name and pronouns (he, his, she, her, hers) preferred by the transgender person. If no preference is known, use the pronouns consistent with the way the subject lives publicly.

Susan Wessling, the deputy editor who supervises The Times’s copy editors, told me that there are two important considerations. “We want to respect the preferences of the subject,” she said, “and we want to provide clarity for readers.”

Toward that end, she said, “We’ll probably use more words than less.” In other words, The Times will explain the change in stories.

“We can’t just spring a new name and a new pronoun” on readers with no explanation, she said. She noted the importance in the stylebook entry of the words “unless a former name is newsworthy or pertinent,” which certainly applies here.

An article on The Times’s Web site on Thursday morning on the gender issue continued to use the masculine pronoun and courtesy title. That, said the associate managing editor Philip B. Corbett, will evolve over time.

It’s tricky, no doubt. But given Ms. Manning’s preference, it may be best to quickly change to the feminine and to explain that â€" rather than the other way around.



A Momentous Day Driven by Ordinary People

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Hours before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 50 years ago, pedestrians on their way to work scurried past Ford’s Theater, its conspicuous sign proclaiming it as the “house where Lincoln died.”

Though the passers-by were distracted, the photographer who captured the image of them, Leonard Freed, was not. He knew that soon, just blocks away, another event would inexorably alter the nation and its uneasy history of race relations.

This photograph (Slide 14) is one of many incisive images by Mr. Freed featured in “This Is the Day: The March on Washington” (J. Paul Getty Museum), a book with essays by the civil rights leader Julian Bond, the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson and the scholar Paul M. Farber. Rather than focusing on the immensity of the crowd or the epochal speeches, Mr. Freed aimed to capture the marchers and their range of responses and emotions: the exuberance, intensity, determination, focus and, inevitably, weariness that reflect the back story of a momentous day.

The march, Mr. Farber wrote, offered Mr. Freed “a spectacle â€" not for marveling from afar or at a fixed distance, but for exploring at ground level.” The night before, the photographer and his wife, Brigitte, had slept at a campsite outside of the city. Awakening at 5 a.m., they drove into Washington a few hours before the march’s official start. Once at the site, Mr. Freed wandered through the mass of demonstrators. His photographs provide one of the best records of the geographic, racial and generational diversity of the marchers and the groups they represented.

Mr. Farber points to one “historical peculiarity” in Mr. Freed’s documentation of the march: its keynote speaker, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., appears in only one image, barely discernible as he delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, surrounded by hordes of spectators. For Mr. Dyson, the sociologist, that photograph (Slide 6) reveals a fundamental truth: while Dr. King was a commanding leader, “he wasn’t the only, and often not even the primary, vehicle” for a movement driven largely by ordinary people.

In hindsight, his absence from the images may also reflect Mr. Freed’s acknowledgment of the limitations of photography. While still pictures were an undeniably powerful medium for documenting important events, they could do little to communicate the words, cadences or inferences of a speech. In that area, television excelled.

DESCRIPTIONLeonard Freed/The Estate of Leonard Freed â€" Magnum Photos (Brigitte Freed) Untitled, from “March on Washington” series. Aug. 28, 1963.

As the New York Times television critic Jack Gould observed at the time, television, unlike the “frozen word or stilled picture” of magazines and newspapers, was able to capture the march’s sensory and aural richness. By 1963, television cameramen could use lightweight, 16-millimeter cameras to navigate fluidly through fast-paced events and shoot them up close and in real time. And Telstar satellites launched the previous year allowed their images to be relayed swiftly around the globe.

Dr. King also understood the potential of television news, and its balance of spoken word and moving image, to influence public opinion.

“The march was the first organized Negro operation which was accorded respect and coverage commensurate with its importance,” he said. “The millions who viewed it on television were seeing an event historic not only because of the subject but because it was being brought into their homes.”

But where television sometimes fails â€" in that its swift pace leaves little room to dwell on the visual details of a story â€" the photograph excels. It demands our sustained attention, teasing out the complexities, the incongruities and, as Mr. Freed’s image of Ford’s Theater attests, the ironies of ostensibly straightforward circumstances. Its attention to visual nuance commands us to stare, to think, to imagine and, ultimately, to feel.

Mr. Freed, a pioneer in the genre of socially conscious photojournalism, captured the march in ways both intimate and penetrating: the sartorial flair of demonstrators, dressed in their Sunday finery, conscious of their role as media ambassadors; sequential images of a singing woman, enraptured by her quest for equality; the middle-aged couple acknowledging the solemnity of the day by bowing their heads in prayer (Slide 7); and the weary marcher on her way home, lost in thought as she gazed out a bus window (Slide 15).

DESCRIPTIONLeonard Freed/The Estate of Leonard Freed â€" Magnum Photos (Brigitte Freed) Untitled, from “March on Washington” series. Aug. 28, 1963.

By slowing down to observe a fast-paced event, these pictures tell us much about the dynamics of race in America. For one, as Mr. Dyson points out, the panoply of African-American marchers in a “rainbow” of skin colors reveals the mutability of racial categories, an insight that also challenges stereotypes. “Dark-skinned blacks who were usually only photographed in buffoonish exaggeration,” Mr. Dyson wrote, “get from Freed a forgiving realism that rescues the blackest blacks from the wasteland of stereotype and restores them to the majestic ordinariness.”

By focusing on the psychic and emotional responses of African-Americans, these photographs challenge the news media’s tendency to see the struggle for racial equality through the eyes and anxieties of white people. In Mr. Freed’s documentation of the march, whites are present, but blacks are in charge. If whites were necessary for peaceful racial coexistence, as symbolized by a photograph of interracial protesters linking arms, Mr. Freed represented them “without the pretense of superiority or the burden of nobility,” Mr. Dyson wrote.

In the end, the images of “This Is the Day” exemplify Mr. Freed’s lifelong quest to show “the connection between things, how they relate.” If coverage of the march in the news media, especially on television, was sweeping and impressionistic, these photographs unveil the intimate human connections that together produced one of the nation’s most consequential events. Fifty years later, they remind us that while Dr. King’s speech was justly enshrined in history, it was but one of the march’s many poignant moments.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



A Momentous Day Driven by Ordinary People

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Hours before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 50 years ago, pedestrians on their way to work scurried past Ford’s Theater, its conspicuous sign proclaiming it as the “house where Lincoln died.”

Though the passers-by were distracted, the photographer who captured the image of them, Leonard Freed, was not. He knew that soon, just blocks away, another event would inexorably alter the nation and its uneasy history of race relations.

This photograph (Slide 14) is one of many incisive images by Mr. Freed featured in “This Is the Day: The March on Washington” (J. Paul Getty Museum), a book with essays by the civil rights leader Julian Bond, the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson and the scholar Paul M. Farber. Rather than focusing on the immensity of the crowd or the epochal speeches, Mr. Freed aimed to capture the marchers and their range of responses and emotions: the exuberance, intensity, determination, focus and, inevitably, weariness that reflect the back story of a momentous day.

The march, Mr. Farber wrote, offered Mr. Freed “a spectacle â€" not for marveling from afar or at a fixed distance, but for exploring at ground level.” The night before, the photographer and his wife, Brigitte, had slept at a campsite outside of the city. Awakening at 5 a.m., they drove into Washington a few hours before the march’s official start. Once at the site, Mr. Freed wandered through the mass of demonstrators. His photographs provide one of the best records of the geographic, racial and generational diversity of the marchers and the groups they represented.

Mr. Farber points to one “historical peculiarity” in Mr. Freed’s documentation of the march: its keynote speaker, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., appears in only one image, barely discernible as he delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, surrounded by hordes of spectators. For Mr. Dyson, the sociologist, that photograph (Slide 6) reveals a fundamental truth: while Dr. King was a commanding leader, “he wasn’t the only, and often not even the primary, vehicle” for a movement driven largely by ordinary people.

In hindsight, his absence from the images may also reflect Mr. Freed’s acknowledgment of the limitations of photography. While still pictures were an undeniably powerful medium for documenting important events, they could do little to communicate the words, cadences or inferences of a speech. In that area, television excelled.

DESCRIPTIONLeonard Freed/The Estate of Leonard Freed â€" Magnum Photos (Brigitte Freed) Untitled, from “March on Washington” series. Aug. 28, 1963.

As the New York Times television critic Jack Gould observed at the time, television, unlike the “frozen word or stilled picture” of magazines and newspapers, was able to capture the march’s sensory and aural richness. By 1963, television cameramen could use lightweight, 16-millimeter cameras to navigate fluidly through fast-paced events and shoot them up close and in real time. And Telstar satellites launched the previous year allowed their images to be relayed swiftly around the globe.

Dr. King also understood the potential of television news, and its balance of spoken word and moving image, to influence public opinion.

“The march was the first organized Negro operation which was accorded respect and coverage commensurate with its importance,” he said. “The millions who viewed it on television were seeing an event historic not only because of the subject but because it was being brought into their homes.”

But where television sometimes fails â€" in that its swift pace leaves little room to dwell on the visual details of a story â€" the photograph excels. It demands our sustained attention, teasing out the complexities, the incongruities and, as Mr. Freed’s image of Ford’s Theater attests, the ironies of ostensibly straightforward circumstances. Its attention to visual nuance commands us to stare, to think, to imagine and, ultimately, to feel.

Mr. Freed, a pioneer in the genre of socially conscious photojournalism, captured the march in ways both intimate and penetrating: the sartorial flair of demonstrators, dressed in their Sunday finery, conscious of their role as media ambassadors; sequential images of a singing woman, enraptured by her quest for equality; the middle-aged couple acknowledging the solemnity of the day by bowing their heads in prayer (Slide 7); and the weary marcher on her way home, lost in thought as she gazed out a bus window (Slide 15).

DESCRIPTIONLeonard Freed/The Estate of Leonard Freed â€" Magnum Photos (Brigitte Freed) Untitled, from “March on Washington” series. Aug. 28, 1963.

By slowing down to observe a fast-paced event, these pictures tell us much about the dynamics of race in America. For one, as Mr. Dyson points out, the panoply of African-American marchers in a “rainbow” of skin colors reveals the mutability of racial categories, an insight that also challenges stereotypes. “Dark-skinned blacks who were usually only photographed in buffoonish exaggeration,” Mr. Dyson wrote, “get from Freed a forgiving realism that rescues the blackest blacks from the wasteland of stereotype and restores them to the majestic ordinariness.”

By focusing on the psychic and emotional responses of African-Americans, these photographs challenge the news media’s tendency to see the struggle for racial equality through the eyes and anxieties of white people. In Mr. Freed’s documentation of the march, whites are present, but blacks are in charge. If whites were necessary for peaceful racial coexistence, as symbolized by a photograph of interracial protesters linking arms, Mr. Freed represented them “without the pretense of superiority or the burden of nobility,” Mr. Dyson wrote.

In the end, the images of “This Is the Day” exemplify Mr. Freed’s lifelong quest to show “the connection between things, how they relate.” If coverage of the march in the news media, especially on television, was sweeping and impressionistic, these photographs unveil the intimate human connections that together produced one of the nation’s most consequential events. Fifty years later, they remind us that while Dr. King’s speech was justly enshrined in history, it was but one of the march’s many poignant moments.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



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