To publish or not to publish — When pictures make headlines
We all remember Alan Kurdi. There was no way escaping his photo back in September 2015 when his body was washed up on the Turkish shore. He was one of hundreds of thousands of refugees who have risked their lives this year to reach Europe, fleeing from the bombs in Syria. I’m not a very sentimental person and after having written an entire paper on picture journalism during the Vietnam war for a course in Communication Science, I would say I’m not as easily shocked by war pictures as I have been when I started my studies in early 2015. However, the photograph of Alan’s body has managed what many other war pictures have failed to accomplish: It shook me to the core.
It was then that I started to wonder what had turned my view on this human tragedy into this shameful indifference that I was experiencing whenever the news revolved around another bombing, another battle, another boat sinking in the Mediterranean sea. When have horrible news stories like these become so trivial that it took the disturbing picture of a drowned toddler to shake me out of my emotional numbness? The only answer I came up with was that I had gotten so accostumed to a high level of violence in the news that I expected to see this kind of content or couldn’t bring myself to care anymore. And then I wondered whether the world had been in need of this wake-up call. Should pictures like that of Alan Kurdi really be on the news where even children can see it just so demonstrate us how resistant we have become to violence on a daily basis?
It is Vietnam all over again, but maybe a bit more intense and emotional. The Vietnam war in the 1970s has become the “Media War” in the minds of the American public as it was the first time that the mass media, especially TV news programmes, were present in a combat zone. One of the most famous pictures is that of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running away from a napalm attack, naked, her clothes burned off her body, terror and fear distorting her young face. Huynh Cong Ut, who took the picture, won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Back then, it was a shocker similar to the image of Alan Kurdi and it sparked a debate about war media coverage among communication scientists. A debate that hasn’t stopped since. Don’t these people have a dignity — even or especially in death — that should protect the from being splashed all over the news front pages?
To cut a long story short: Yes, they have. While there are no legal rights, prohibiting the publication of their photographs as long as they are taken in a public place and a public context, there are moral codes and journalism has abandoned them in favour of sensationalism. And we’re not only talking about boulevard media like the Sun, but quality newspapers such as The Guardian or The Times whose behaviour was strongly condemned by many media critics. One could now argue that the picture of Alan was published in order to convince more Euorpean countries to take refugees and to highlight how urgent help is needed in Turkey and Greece. But it doesn’t verify the publication of such distressing photographs, as heartbreaking as they might be.
Violence has become a big part of our daily news consumption and we should be aware of that. If we’re not able to remember this, it is up to the media to remind us that what we’re seeing should not become the status quo in our minds. Using emotional photographs, however, is not helping at all. It takes the media coverage to an entire new level and might turn into a competition of who publishes the most shocking photographs. As for us, such reckless actions can lead to a dangerous habit of consuming news in the long term, influencing news publishing for generations to come.
