BHHRG

Whether William Randolph Hearst ever telegraphed the infamous phrase, “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war” to Frederick Remmington after his complaint in 1897 that there was no sign of war in Cuba is open to doubt. However, the widespread acceptance of this iconic statement of the power of the press baron is very revealing since it simultaneously indicates that people suspect that much of what they are told as news is “imaginary” to put it kindly and yet still such is the power of images that they impose a picture of events on us.[1] That was in the age of newspapers. Today publics in the West are commonly supposed to be in thrall to the audio-visual media but strangely enough our own electronic age no longer requires pictures to confirm words. Vivid prose and radio pictures are all that the posse of journalists and NGO activists in Andijan on that dreadful day can offer us by way of description of events. Pictures exist of before the “massacre” and of its aftermath but not of the event itself. This is a curious omission in an age of ubiquitous photographic devices.