The New Yorker

DESCRIPTION

Nearly 20 years after a small group of U.S. Marines killed 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha, The New Yorker worked closely with Iraqi survivors to uncover the truth about the notorious shooting, for which no U.S. soldier served prison time. The magazine’s nine-part podcast not only presented conflicting accounts of the massacre from Iraqi witnesses and the U.S. military but set out to determine whose version was backed by evidence. Additionally, after The New Yorker, with support from survivors in Haditha, sued the U.S. government to obtain more than 100 secret photographs that proved the shooting was a war crime, journalists handled the grisly images with sensitivity: They recognized that survivors had a right to see the unnerving photographs — but only to the extent each survivor chose to revisit the traumatic day through the newly uncovered evidence. New Yorker journalists followed a similar procedure when sharing other new information with survivors, including direct accounts from Marines, and assumed a high degree of care when deciding what to ultimately publish. While New Yorker journalists believed that publishing photos would back their contention that soldiers killed unarmed women and children, they did not want to violate victims’ privacy. In the end, the magazine published only 10 photographs — and only after obtaining permission from victims’ families.