"Tank Man" Tiananmen Square 1989: Western Media

Most people are vaguely aware of the infamous "Tank Man" photo that framed the Tienanmen Square protests in 1989 in Beijing China. In the media, it has been framed as the iconic image of one man stopping an empire single handedly. Americans seem to gravitate to this image and also seem comfortable with it. The image conveys the protests as righteous, young cause against something insurmountable-yet attempted. One can easily see the power of the iconic photo and its place in our collective cultural history.

An interesting aspect that is rarely discussed is the role of the western media at the time of the protests. The Tienanmen Square student protests started in April of 1989 and lasted until they were abruptly dispersed June 4th, 1989 with tanks and the Chinese military. There are many aspects to the Tienanmen Square protests but I want to focus particularly on the western media. The evening of the intense conflict between the Chinese military and Chinese citizens, the western media was mostly holed up in the Beijing Hotel. Either the media was too afraid to venture out into the field of fire (with good reason) or the Chinese government was hovering over the media to censor the content.

So, Chinese students rally for months to ask for changes in the Chinese government. Chinese government doesn't handle the situation correctly and ends up killing large amounts of people in cold blood at the biggest public square in the world. Thousands of people were probably killed (of course, the Chinese government and Chinese students have different numbers of the death toll). And when anyone ever has a discussion about the Tienanmen Square protests, the "Tank Man" springs into everyone's mind. Why, of all the different angles one could use to express and explain the killings, did the western media choose this photo? Perhaps it was because most of the rioting happened at night and they didn't have any clean photos or video of the carnage? Or maybe the killings were too gruesome to take photos and video of like many journalist did in Vietnam. Or maybe, and possibly more likely, the Chinese media had censored most of their other content and this was the best photo they had at the time.

Ironically, all of the western journalist were staying in the same hotel--like so many wars, going on a journalist-vacation with their lives as a collateral--and all had the same view. This now world-renown photo was not taken by just one journalist that happened to get lucky. At least one person shot a video of it and roughly five western photographers shot the incident from different angles (varying floors and balconies from the Beijing Hotel).

Take a second to view the differences between the BBC coverage of the events of June 4th, 1989 and then look at the metamorphosis of the Tienanmen Square story into something abstracted with some sort of ethical-moral meaning imposed on the situation.

BBC Coverage:

Warped Focus of the Tienanmen Square to a Suburbanized Posterchild of freedom:

Now let us look at the difference between the Tienanmen Square 1989 "Tank Man" and other famous photos from our collection news photography:

(From left to right: Vietnamese Girl burned from napalm, Monk Immolation from the Vietnam, Kent State Shooting, Assassination of Vietnamese dissident)

Obviously, the "Tank Man" coverage is much more symbolic than the more gruesome and direct coverage of the BBC. Why didn't the journalist publish photos of the dead people? of the burning tanks? Of people being shot? Like I propositioned before, perhaps they didn't have the photos. Or perhaps this was the photos that was the most poetic.

Parallels come to mind between the falling of the Saddam Hussein Statue in Baghdad in the Second Gulf War (isn't that a horrible name for a war?). After more inspection, the photo shoot was fabricated with roughly 150 Kurds and other minorities. While photographically symbolic, it didn't come close to capturing the mood of the Iraqi people.

So, what's the take home? Just think a little be more about where those photos come from and the motives behind the photographers before we allow the raw emotion/symbolism of a photo take over.