PressEthic

Photographs are a double-edged sword. Vivid images are great, but should readers see those shots that could be too vivid?

As blogger Glenn Greenwald writes, it depends on where you are. Greenwald argues that the photos that ran in Brazil when druglord Erismar Rodrigues Moreira was killed would have never run in the American press.

Maybe not on page one, maybe not above the fold, maybe not larger than a certain size, maybe not in color - there are a thousand shades of gray that would lean one editor toward running them and another toward not running them. But if and when photos of the intensity Greenwald describes don't run, it might not be a bad thing.

If American media underestimate readers' abilities to stomach the full story, then they're wrong. But when is it just sensationalizing to sell papers, or tossing a dead body on the front page for any five-year-old to see? Ignoring the celebrating police officers in Brazil would be obfuscating the truth and portraying them in a false light. But a bullet-ridden body? There's a difference between gruesome yet informative photos and gratuitous violence.

Journalists get paid to know the difference.

That doesn't mean they're infallible, but it does mean they should be respected for the process of debating whether a photo should run. To leave a gap in the story probably isn't the reason - after all, that contradicts the whole concept of reporting.

Greenwald writes:

Again and again, Americans are denied the ability to be fully informed and to view images of what actually occurred by virtue of the belief that the media knows best what is good for its readers and has the mandate of protecting, rather than informing, them.

Journalists write for their readers, to inform them and, yes, to protect them - in a variety of ways. If they can't be trusted for their editorial decisions, then how can they be trusted to decide what's news? Covering everything that happens every day just isn't possible. So do they cover what they've been trained to see as news, or give up on informing readers at all?