Death is often what keeps news alive.
Deaths can be shocking, scandalous, scary or sad. News media has the ability to sensationalize the death, to honor the dead, or prod into the investigation. Depending on the celebrity and the cause of their death, visual media has distinct ways of covering death.
This project is a study to understand and find trends over time of how visual media portrays deaths of celebrities. It focuses on people who died in the United States from an assassination, suicide or accident, rather than celebrities who died of natural causes.
How did the media portray differences in death 100 years ago vs. today? Is there a correlation between the way they are portrayed in the news based on the way they died?
photojournalism: a dying business 