PressEthic

Photographing the Dead in New Orleans

There have been a number of posts on the blog on this issue.

A few weeks ago the New York Times ran a small, 2 or 3 paragraph piece in which it reported that FEMA officials were asking journalists not to photograph corpes in New Orleans. Unfortunately I cannot locate this piece on the Times website, perhaps due to its brevity, but there have been numerous articles in various news outlets on this issue.

FEMA officials gave as their reasoning the fact that family members of the victims had not yet been notified and they were concerned that the dead could be identified through a photograph in the newspaper. This seems dubious reasoning to me and an attempt by FEMA officials to minimize graphic images that depicted a facet of the reality of the situation but also underscored the impotence of the agency to control the crisis.

Not that there is not an ethical discussion to be had here – there is. The photographing of bodies in a situation like this raises questions of the journalist’s ultimate duty. Is it to protect the family of the victim? Or is it to inform the general public by conveying, in the most truthful and effective way possible, what was happening in New Orleans?

In this case, I believe that taking the picture is an ethical act because it fulfills the journalists first duty of informing the public. Because of the nature of the disaster, photographs were often the most effective way of depicting the situation, as the Times did with its front page photo on September 2nd. There were also print pieces, such as this one by Dan Barry, that touched on the significance of bodies left unattended in the streets.

Although I do not think it unethical to photograph the dead in this situation, there is a distinction to be made which I do not think renders one ethically inconsistent. While I believe that a main motivator in FEMA's request was self-preservation, there is unarguably a legitimate point regarding the rights of the family.

I think it would be unethical to photograph a body that could potentially be identified by the family through the picture.

From reading the first chapter of Media Ethics, it seems to me that you could arrive at a decision in this case using some form of utilitarian reasoning, if I read it correctly (of which there is absolutely no guarantee.) That is, the “rightness” of photographing the dead is measured by the outcome.

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the photos widely published, and all of those that I have seen, were of bodies that were unidentifiable through the picture. An example again is the Times’ September 2nd front page image, which did an excellent job of depicting how inured the people of New Orleans had become to the site of dead bodies while not revealing the identity – and thus, in my opinion, not disrespecting – the dead.

In that case specifically, and regarding the issue as a whole, the taking of the picture (and its publication) is an ethical act if the deceased cannot be identified, because it serves the journalist’s ultimate duty of truthfully informing the public while respecting the rights of the family.