Last Monday, a couple of hours after the
blasts at the Boston Marathon, a friend of mine on Twitter posted a rather
disturbing image. It was that of a man injured in the explosions: he’s in a
wheelchair, surrounded by emergency officials. His foot and lower leg have been
sheared off (presumably in the explosion). What’s left is a bloody stump,
jagged edges of bone, and charred skin. His face is mercifully pixelated, but
the extent of his injuries is clear and horrific.
I respect my friend’s judgement (on most
occasions), but in this case I immediately sent her a private message, asking
what she thought was the value of posting such an image. She said it was
‘sometimes…necessary to understand the [gravity] of a situation’, that it’s not
always insensitive to post such images. My concerns were about where the line
is between that and being sensationalistic, or being voyeurs.
Editors have had to grapple with these
issues for decades. Photographs are remarkably powerful. During the mayhem
after the 2007 elections, thousands of pictures were taken of the human cost of
the violence – bodies hacked, burned, disembowelled and dismembered. Most were
never seen in the mainstream media, and it is only until Boniface Mwangi’s
travelling exhibition, ‘Kenya Burning’ that many came face to face with the
brutality of the violence. The harrowing, uncompromising photos showed what
Kenyans did to each other, and are an unrepentant chronicle of Kenya’s darkest
days.
Earlier, the bomb blast at the United
States Embassy in August 1998 told a similar story. I once went through the
video archives at a television station, and was shocked at the brutality with
which some of the bodies had been torn apart.
There’s a reason you didn’t see these
images splashed out in mass media. Whereas editors come across these types of
images on a daily basis (literally every day, in the case of fatal road
accidents), many often stick to the Hippocratic principle – first do no harm.
Death, especially violent, unplanned death, intrudes upon human dignity.
Western media is notorious for wantonly – almost gleefully – trading in images
of dead and dying Africans, in ways that would be verboten for their own (good
luck finding a single picture of the dead after the September 2001 attacks, at
least in official media sources).
But everything has changed now. In the age
of the ubiquitous mobile phone camera, and one-click sharing onto social media
sites, the careful (some would say reticent) vetting of what is to be consumed
by the mass public and what isn’t has moved from the few to, well, just about
everyone. There was a sad, and
horrifying story told about a year ago. A woman had been killed in a road
accident in Nairobi, and passers-by were crowded around her taking pictures on
their mobile phones. Propriety, good manners and decorum were sacrificed at the
altar of getting, and sharing, the image. Few (at that moment) were concerned
with covering up the body, or fetching the police.
And that brings us to our decision making
(since we are all editors now). There are three distinct decisions that come
into play. At the scene of an accident, does one pull out a phone or tablet (or
pocket camera) to document images of death and horror? What is the purpose of
the image thus taken?
In many instances, many of us still have a
sense of modesty to not want to trade in pictures of death and destruction. But
it’s when we come across the images of the less prudent on social media that
the other two decisions kick in. One is involuntary. We will look at the images
(often in fascination and horror), for much the same reasons as we will
rubberneck at the site of a traffic smash-up – we cannot help it.
The third decision is the most crucial. Do
we then hit the ‘share’ or ‘retweet’ button (often with a tut-tutting comment)?
Is there any value to be added by re-broadcasting the pictures?
There is legitimate complaint that editors
(the selfsame reticent ones in the mainstream media) shield the public from
necessary images of carnage – the necessity being that the public needs to
learn the gravity of some situations. Democratisation of the media (primarily
through social media) has meant that this curatory role is now shared among
many. But there is a case to be made for restraint – not just the human dignity
one, but also to do with the inflammatory nature of images of violence, and the
need to protect audiences such as the underaged.
But these concerns may be moot now.
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