PressEthic

Last Saturday, a cameraman from the Associated Press filmed two policemen beating a 64-year old person in a street of New Orleans. The video was broadcast several times this week end on ABC and CNN. Many other media organizations over the world also talked extensively about this event.

What makes a story newsworthy? Many factors are listed in every journalism textbook: the impact of the story on people, its controversial aspect, its unusual character, its emotional weight, its usefulness or educational value, etc (Writing and Reporting the News, Lanson and Stephens).

What happened in New Orleans shows that there is another major factor to decide whether or not an event is newsworthy: the presence of a video camera. Without this shocking tape, would TV news broadcasts have devoted that much time to the misconduct of some policemen in New Orleans? Probably not. Concerns about the behavior of policemen in the devastated city were almost nowhere in the news before this week-end. And if instead of a video, news organizations had only had official reports or personal accounts describing the scene, I am not sure they would have made a big story out of it.

But is the random presence of a cameraman a good indicator of the importance of a story? If the same kind of incident happened on a regular basis in another big city, would we know about it only if there were videos of it?

Either the beating in New Orleans is just anecdotic, and then it does not deserve that much coverage, or this event is actually part of a larger pattern of incidents with the police in this city, and then this should have been in the news for several weeks.