I have always been fascinated by death and how it is covered in the media, which is weird to admit at times. My undergraduate degree is in speech and media communications, and I was forever changed by my studies during that time. One assigned reading that stands out was Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, which wpis a commentary on how the horror of war is shared for public consumption. It was a book that changed my life. That said, I was looking for something similar in Death Makes the News. While I very much appreciated many of the points made by the author, it did feel a bit too textbook-ish at times. Yes, this was also a study in media coverage of death, however I felt there could have been more interesting commentary that could have been provided. Despite this, though, I thought it was an interesting read that could lend itself to many a media communications classroom at the college level.

After reading this book you will never look at the news the same.  The author takes a detailed look at how the media portrays death in the news.  I found it fascinating that often our perception of what is shown on the news is not supported by real numbers.  Anyone with an interest in photojournalism and censorship will enjoy this book.

A great expose on what happens behind the scenes in the newsroom when death is involved. Media today is saturated with images of death. No longer in just movies and video games, the news thrives on death. But where is that line drawn and how far will it be pushed?

I did not get to finish the last tiny bit. Though I enjoyed what I did read.

If you ever watch the news, you should read this book. It explores the idea of death in the media. With explanations why some photos are shown and others are not, a reader will notice the photos or lack there of on their source of news.

Very good take on the media and how they present death and other topics. This book focuses on many subjects that you may or may not have thought about when watching the news be it via tv or internet. The various images that are used, again the very way it is presented to us the public. There were many things mentioned in this book that I admit I never really looked at closely, but once this book touched on it, I saw it quite a bit. It also touches on how various news agencies report crime. I never really compared the two, You will after reading this book. This book was a very good study on the media. I found it engrossing and very easy to follow. I would recommend this book to others. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

Sometimes it feels like all day, every day, we are bombarded with images of death. Newspapers, magazines, television, TV news, and even my morning podcasts all make learning about the deaths of others a part of my daily life. Considering how much I am faced with the news of death, I have certainly not taken the time to dissect how that death is portrayed to me and why there are so many seeming inconsistencies. Fishman really takes a deep dive into research on how death is portrayed in the news, whether it is tragic events described, videos of death, or photos of death. The result is that this book really exposes something fundamental about how we deal with death in the U.S. It exposes the fact that the way we talk about death is filled with hipocrisy and bias. 

Once in a while, I come across a book that does the work of actually pointing out things that I have been experiencing for my whole life and makes me actually take a good look at it and this book is one of them. I felt lights going on in my brain in just about every chapter, connecting my own experiences to the conclusions and observations that Fishman writes. In the time that I read this book, there have been three incidents of mass casualty in the United States and I saw the news coverage in a brand new light. I could see the patterns that Fishman points out. I could see the gaps in the coverage that are a result of news organizations' aversion to showing images of American death. I could see the news reacting exactly as Fishman has observed that they react. Of course, I have been experiencing those patterns for my whole life but this book really allowed me to experience that coverage critically.

There were a few points in the book that I found especially enlightening. One is Fishman's description of the images and symbols used to imply death in the media coverage of tradegies. Once I read the chapter "Alternative Images" I began to see these images everywhere. I really did have a feeling that I was being constantly bombarded with images of death but this chapter made me realize just how many of those images actually imply death, rather than showing it outright. This was something of a revelation and it has been interesting to consciously witness the media jump through hoops in order to avoid showing any direct images of death.

The next interesting topic that I would like to call out as especially enlightening for me is the way that avoiding images of death creates a theoretical issue when it comes to photojournalism. The reason that we value photojournalism is that it has an incredible ability to reveal reality and since they are photographs, they provide evidence of events and a strong fidelity to the reality of the events. A photojournalist's job is to show you what happened. But the news media's aversion to images of death and tragedy mean that photojournalists actually have to go out of their way to capture images not of what actually happened, but that imply what actually happened. I am continually fascinated by this issue and I expect I will be returning to Fishman's book in order to re-read the fantastic points she makes about this tension in photojournalism.

The last part of the book that I want to point out is her comparison of the coverage of death between "low-brow" media (tabloids) and "high brow" media (New York Times). The general assumption in the U.S. is that tabloids are "trashy" and have a genera lack of decency that leads them to publish more graphic photos of tragedy and death than the "high brow" news outlets. Fishman proves that this is false, that tabloids are actually less likely to publish photos with corpses and less likely to publish prominently in their publication than the New York Times and other respected papers. As Fishman points out, this poses an interesting question about cultural associations of tabloids with low-class people and the myriad of biases that arise from that.

I will say that while these points were some of the most compelling to me, they only scratch the surface of what Fishman covers in her book. 

There were a couple of sticking points for me with this book. The first is a kind of half-complaint. I knew this was a textbook when I requested it and I do not mind reading textbooks for fun. I find that some of them are engaging and fun to read. For a text book, this book was very text book-ish. It's technical and not always accessible. If you are someone like me who likes to read text books, then this book will probably be great for you. If you struggle with staying engaged in text books, then I would be more hesitant to recommend this book to you.

The only other issue I had is also fairly minor. I wanted more discussion of the Black Lives Matter Movement. I was just waiting for this discussion and excited to see what Fishman had to say. The Black Lives Matter Movement is an absolute phenomenon. It's huge and it it only growing in social and political power. The ideology of the movement is spreading to Socialist and Democratic groups and the issues are only more relevant in the Trump era. Images of death are at the center of the movement. The outrage sparked by images of Michael Brown, Eric Gardner, and more are what started this massive movement. There was a lot of discussion about how to treat dead bodies and images of death in the media and that tension is explored a lot in this book related to other tragedies. I think that the BLM Movement is an interesting, accessible, and rich topic that is really grounded in the information that Fishman covers and I would have liked to see a lot more content about it. Over all, the section takes up less than a page, which just felt like a missed opportunity to me or even like it was added as an after thought. I liked what she said but I wish there had been more of it.

Over all, this was a really good read. I enjoyed the writing, the photos used to illustrate her points were good, and I do feel like this book gave me more clarity and the ability to think about this issue more deliberately. I will be interested in other books and writing on this topic and from this author.

Death Makes the News How the Media Censor and Display the Dead by Jessica M. Fishman is a very interesting book in particular if you are in the media, because it explains the profound meaning of death and how death and dead people are daily treated in the news. 

Death  is everywhere today. Cinema, video games, TV. 

We mustn't forget the reality. Terrorist attacks, yesterday an episode in London disconnected by ISIS and terrorist attacks in grade to case a lot of mess, with some people injured. Devastation, quakes, floods. 
We are bombarded by death and so by a lot of sadness don't you think so?

But...There is a segment of this society, the one of mass media uninterested to let us see, talking of photojournalism, death or dead people.

Let's say in general that American newsmagazines won't never tend to publish any corpse of an American citizen dead, (and the life of an American citizen is more important than the one of any other person in the globe) but sometimes media can indulge in pictures of foreigners dead somewhere for some specific reasons and the news relevant in the American territory as well.

Mostly, corpses, and postmortem pictures are more seen in tabloids newsmagazines than not in newsmagazines like the NYT, the Washington Post or the Boston Globe (treated in the book the Boston Marathon Bombing) where the corpse and what happened to it in the while, - reasons of death etc - is left to the imagination of the reader.

Not all the time: true. Once it was published, interesting story, the execution of a lady at the beginning of 1900 through the electric chair on the first page of a newsmagazine.  

We will see that the same treatment is reserved for public people. When Lady Diana died 20 years ago there were pictures of the Princess in the car after the car incident thanks to the presence of a lot of paparazzi around but newsmagazines refused to launch that final imagines of the princess, preferring to present, and to continue to give to the readers an imagine of a healthy, positive lady, passed away too soon.

Many example from the world, from the US territory, the book offers a complete coverage of the meaning of death and dead people and events covered by the media during these past recent years.


Being a reporter I can tell you I go proud of our field where decency is respected in most cases, people and children not too scared by a vision too hard in a newsmagazine and where a condition of normality is, anyway always searched for not falling into a morbidity never wanted by respectable, big mass media.

The book will be released on Nov 21.

I thank NetGalley and NYUPress for this ebook.