Day: December 4, 2021

On Sept. 5 of this year, I watched reporter John Dickerson interview Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photographer Richard Drew on the CBS Sunday Morning television program.

Drew’s most famous photograph may be “The Falling Man”, which shows a man plummeting to the ground following the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. In the days following 9/11, this picture appeared on the front pages of countless newspapers around the United States and around the world.

To this day around the anniversary of the infamous attacks, many Americans use this and other photos of other falling men and women to remind us of the importance of this day in history. On the other hand, some people consider it disrespectful to show such unpleasant pictures, maintaining that photos like these demonstrate a lack of empathy toward families and friends of those who died, for whom such images are the last ones they will ever see of their loved ones.

Another famous photograph taken by Richard Drew was that of Robert F. Kennedy as the presidential candidate lay dying on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after being shot by assassin Sirhan Sirhan on June 5, 1968. In the CBS interview, Drew described how he climbed onto a table to better photograph the pandemonium.

Drew said that he and another photographer were approached by Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, who tried to wave them off from taking photos of her husband.

Dickerson asked Drew, “What did you think when Ethel said, ‘Don’t take the picture’?’

“Well,” responded Drew, “that was her choice, but not mine.”

“What’s your choice?” inquired Dickerson.

“My job is to record history,” answered Drew, “and I record history every day.”

“What happens if you mess with that rule?” asked Dickerson.

“You’re not a journalist,” replied Drew. “Then, you’re just a person with a camera.”

I recently did a story, followed by two updates to that story, about a man, Bernabe Trenado Cruz, who, late Tuesday afternoon, shot into a car occupied by relatives. The incident happened in the area of 514 Fourth Street in Orland.

Cruz then ran away, climbing over a fence separating the back yard of the residence from an alleyway running north and south between Fourth and Fifth Streets. As he was climbing the fence, his gun went off, fatally wounding him.

Cruz died in the alley. His body wasn’t discovered until about 8:45 Wednesday morning.

At the scene later on Wednesday, I took a photo of Cruz’s body on the ground in the alley. I was quite a distance away, and the body in the picture is completely unrecognizable.

Nevertheless, a handful of people or so have expressed their objections to the photo, demanding that I remove it. Printing the picture was “beyond insensitive,” one person said.

However, it is not the job of a journalist to be sensitive. It is the job of a journalist to print the truth, to show reality in all its beauty and all its ugliness and all its states in between.

The death of Bernabe Trenado Cruz was indeed a tragedy, regardless of whatever character flaws he possessed, whatever crimes he committed, and whatever bad choices he made in his life. But this does not change the fact that journalists write and photograph in order to keep the public in general informed, not to protect the feelings of a small number of people with personal agendas, even agendas they sincerely consider legitimate.

The Observer will continue to do its best to show the realities of life and death in Glenn County.

Even if that makes some of us uncomfortable. – Larry Judkins