PressEthic

A photograph of a burned sheep that ran in the Sacramento Bee has upset some of the paper’s readers.

The photograph of the charred, but alive sheep accompanied a news story on the wild fires that destroyed three homes, and injured over 400 farm animals in rural Yolo County.

A follow up article on Sunday by public editor Armando Acuña addressed the reader backlash:

"Have you lost your sense of decency? That picture of the burned sheep on the front page of Saturday's paper is absolutely terrible," said reader Rita Carroll. "What did you gain; have you turned into the National Enquirer? All that is missing is the alien spaceship." "I have never seen anything in any newspaper that equals the shocking photo on the front page of Saturday's newspaper. ... (It) smells of sensationalism and poor taste," wrote Anita Marshall of Shingle Springs. "Why do you think small children want to see this, let alone adults? It turned my stomach."

Though some property was lost in the blaze, the article mostly focused on the threat to and loss of farm animals, and so I’d have to say that the photograph of the burned sheep was a natural to accompany the article. Editors at the Bee are defending themselves on that same merit.

"Deputy Director of Photography Sue Morrow, who edited staff photographer Kevin German's pictures of the sheep, said she and German were appalled about what happened to the animals. In her mind, the selection of the burned-sheep photo conveyed the sense of urgency and loss. She said she considered how readers might react, but that the photo outweighed that concern because of how powerfully it illustrated the tragedy caused by the wind-fanned fire. 'I didn't see it as gratuitous or over-the-top,' she said. 'I'm not unsympathetic (to readers' objections), but sometimes we have to run difficult pictures to tell the story ... and to get the point across.'"

The picture is still posted in the paper's website, and though a tough one to look at, I agree that’s was not only the best photograph to run with the article, but also the only one worth printing since that’s what the article was mainly about. The loss of animal life is arguably one of the most compelling stories of the month-long wild fires.

If the editors yielded to the possibility of backlash and instead ran a picture of let's say, the actual flames or a damaged building, I would have been left wondering what happened the picture of the sheep. One obviously would have been taken, and not running that photo would have left a glaring hole in the story.

Though the suffering of animals is tragic, the point is that journalists are paid to portray the truth, even when the truth is hard to accept.