We do not yet know all the details. We do not even know most of the details. What we do know is that earlier today, a passenger jet carrying 295 people crashed on the Russian/Ukrainian border. We know that all aboard were killed.
I know something else, too, something you might not: that one of the people who perished today was a young woman, thin, with shoulder-length hair that was brown and a little bit wavy. I know what she was wearing when she died: a t-shirt of bright white and a skirt of deep black. I know that when she died, she was holding something. Or someone. Her pale arms, stark in a sea of fuel-blackened wreckage, remain frozen in an awkward embrace.
I know all this because of The New York Times, which, to accompany its article about the crash, initially included a photograph that included that young woman. Or, rather, the corpse of that young woman. Other outlets have used the same image to illustrate their own stories on the tragedy. This is, on the one hand, unsurprising: There are only nine images of the crash so far from the Reuters news wire, and the one containing the young woman's body is the most illustrative of them all. It'd be easy to miss her, pale and small, within the wreckage. It'd be easy to miss the warning Reuters appended to its caption: "ATTENTION EDITORS - VISUAL COVERAGE OF SCENES OF INJURY OR DEATH."