Photos of the Drowned Syrian Boy Shook the World, But Not For Long

They were pictures that shook the world.

But not for long.

The photos, which appeared in newspapers around the world in September, showed a young Syrian boy who lay drowned on a Turkish beach. Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi died when the rubber dinghy that was to carry him and his Syrian family to safety in Greece capsized. As we noted in September, the pictures, printed in newspapers around the world, drove home the terrible human cost of Europe’s failure to deal with the refugees looking for shelter from war and deprivation.

“Reaction to the photos has been swift,” reported the New York Times. “Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President François Hollande of France issued a joint statement…calling for “a permanent and obligatory mechanism” to allocate refugees among the 28 member states of the European Union and for new reception centers in Italy and Greece.”

But a new report by the European Journalism Observatory, a Swiss-based media institute, shows that the pictures’ powerful message was short lived.

“Western European newspapers became significantly more sympathetic towards migrants and refugees immediately after photographs of a drowned boy on a Turkish beach were published at the beginning of September, but within one week most had reverted to their original editorial position,” says the report.

“The study”, notes Poynter, “inspected three papers in each of eight countries — the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, United Kingdom and Ukraine — that it categorized as ideologically left or right or as a tabloid. It proceeded to grade its coverage of the refugee crisis as positive, meaning compassionate, negative or simply neutral.”

Papers in Western Europe devoted more space to the refugee crisis following the publication of the photos, but the positive humanitarian tone of the coverage soon decreased to pre-photo levels, noted the report.

It’s clear that the power of an emotional image can have an effect on public opinion. But the report also confirms the suspicions of many observers that the longterm impact of such images is questionable, at least in terms of how the media addresses issues. The nature of news, after all, is to move on to what is new.

“I guess we have to wait for the journalism awards for 2015 to find out where the picture lands in the history of photojournalism,” said photo historian Mary Panzer in an interview with Poynter.

What do photographs have to do with the course of history?

“Not much, if anything in the short run,” Panzer said. “Perhaps the story just needs more time to play out, and this is just the latest episode.”