Is It Wrong to GIF Serious News?
Yesterday, after months of pressure and a judge’s order, the city of Chicago released dashcam video of the fatal police shooting of a black teenager named Laquan McDonald. The officer has already been charged with first degree murder, yet the video’s release still sparked very strong reaction, including impassioned demonstrations.
Disturbingly, 2015 has been a year of video after video surfacing of police fatally shooting black suspects. Eric Harris. Walter Scott. Jerame Reid. Sam Dubose.
There’s disagreement over the ethics and benefits of capturing and releasing videos of such events. Many argue that these videos must come to light and must be watched to expose the truth and galvanize opposition to police brutality and racist practices in law enforcement.
But others feel, equally strongly, that videos of killings — by police and otherwise — are basically snuff films, and it’s wrong to watch them.
One of the chief criticisms is about how these death videos are portrayed by the media and shared on social media. Readers don’t always get enough warning or opportunity to avoid what they’d prefer not to see. Which is why publishing a screenshot of a fatal shooting on a newspaper front page is widely seen as insensitive at best.
And increasingly, we are getting our news via video — not just on TV, not just on YouTube, but on social media, which has very quickly moved into defaulting to autoplay. So when death videos are published, many of us are seeing them, whether we want to or not, in our feeds.
And it’s not just autoplay videos — it’s GIFs.
Let’s not forget that it took a very long time for news organizations to fully embrace color photography. The first color photo appeared in a print newspaper back in 1959, but it took the boldly colorful USA Today exploding on the scene in the 1980s to push the major newspapers to update their print facilities and start running color pics.
The New York Times introduced color in 1997 — carefully, so as not to be seen as betraying its journalistic standards. Of course, there was backlash. Many readers of the Times and other papers felt color was cartoonish and not befitting serious news. Less than 20 years later, it would be hard to find many readers who still feel that way.
The speed of tech and the nature of competition being what it is now, editors and readers don’t have years to get used to autoplay videos and GIFs in news coverage. Decisions about multimedia are often made on the fly. Including when death videos are released.
Last night, The Daily Beast tweeted out a GIF made from the Laquan McDonald shooting video — and met with immediate condemnation. The GIF was widely viewed as an offensive trivialization of the young man’s death and of black lives.
The Daily Beast heard the criticism and deleted the tweet.
Was this GIF offensive because it’s a mini-snuff film that appears in your feed before you get to choose whether you want to watch it or not? Because a brief, looping clip of the most graphic part of a death video, without full context, inherently treats a weighty event as trivial — and perhaps, too, as entertainment? Because the GIF is chiefly a vehicle for pop culture and wry commentary, not for seriousness and death?
All of the above?
Or are GIFs (and autoplay videos and Vines and Snapchat stories) just a new frontier in immersive storytelling that feels unserious and inappropriate to many people now, like color photography in the print newspaper? Something that we’re going to see more and more of and ultimately forget ever made us uncomfortable? A tool that we’ll soon come to embrace as an effective way for engaging and immersing us in news events we should know and care about?
These questions deserve serious reflection and discussion, not just among news and social media editors, but in national conversation. Editors can and must create ethical standards for their organizations, but we should listen to what readers and viewers think too.
I’m the founder and editor in chief of the independent digital news site Kicker, which explains the most important and compelling news stories in a way that’s digestible and engaging. You can follow me on Twitter here and follow Kicker on Twitter here.
