When Is a Picture too Graphic to Run?   

The irony was chilling. The 22 print and broadcast journalists attending a seminar in early October on ethical decision making at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, had spent part of the day discussing whether newspapers should run photographs of dead bodies. That night, footage of the dead U.S. soldier being dragged down a Mogadishu street was aired on the evening news.

The video – plus the photograph the next day in the St. Petersburg Times and numerous other newspapers – led seminar participant Phil Record, ombudsman at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, to organize an informal survey of his colleagues. Twelve said they would have run the picture on page one – six in color and six in black and white. Five would have used it inside in black and white, three would not have used it, one was uncertain and one did not answer.

The hypothetical decisions at the Poynter symposium reflected those made in newsrooms across the country. Lou Gelfand, reader representative of Minneapolis' Star Tribune, found that of 34 major dailies, 11 used the photograph on the front page, including the New York Times and USA Today; 15 used it inside, and eight didn't use it.

The picture, taken by the Toronto Star's Paul Watson, was transmitted by the Associated Press with a warning that the soldier was unidentified and that his family might not have been notified. "The photo was so strong that it overrode any consideration" about identification, says AP Managing Editor Darrell Christian.

Other journalists agreed. "That photo said more about the failure of U.S. policy in Somalia than all the news stories written in the past six months," wrote Arizona Republic columnist Steve Wilson, whose paper used the picture.

But some editors said the photo was too offensive. Sacramento Bee Ombudsman Art Nauman quoted Managing Editor Rick Rodriguez as saying "the picture was too graphic. It was an image that would stick in people's minds, unlike the television image that is fleeting."

Readers made the same points in criticizing the Florida Times-Union's decision to put the picture on page one. The Jacksonville paper received more than 300 complaints, according to Reader Advocate Mike Clark. He believes the paper broke "a compact of sorts" with readers by publishing a picture of an identifiable casualty whose family might not have been notified. The photo "turned readers away," and many of them "did not read a word of the coverage," he wrote in an October 6 column.

The overwhelming majority of readers who bombarded papers across the country with letters and phone calls thought the photo should not have been used. The Houston Chronicle logged about 500 phone calls, all but a handful criticizing the decision to publish the picture, says spokesperson Lainie Gordon.
Reader Franklin Thompson defended the Chronicle. "We should not condemn or lash out at the bearer of bad news, but at the individuals who create it," he wrote. "I prefer not to have important world issues censored."

But Larry Rivers, executive director of the Washington office of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, believes the central issue is not censorship, but respect for the dead. The public could draw conclusions about U.S. policy without the media "showing dead corpses of American servicemen being driven through the streets," he said on CNN's "Larry King Live."

Thousands of viewers and readers agreed. "As the mother of an Army M.P. lucky enough to have returned home safely from Somalia, I am horrified that another mother witnessed her son's picture as you printed it," Cathy J. Waters wrote in a letter to the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.

In fact, Mary Cleveland of Portsmouth, Virginia, identified the soldier as her son after she saw the picture in Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot. Cleveland told a Virginian-Pilot reporter that running the picture was "not fair" and that "pictures like that should never be printed."

The managing editor of the Virginian-Pilot – whose readers include many military families – had written an eloquent defense of the paper's decision to use the picture on the day the photo was published. "We could not deny people so closely linked to events so far away the fullest understanding of what is happening and what others are seeing and reacting to," Cole C. Campbell wrote.

Campbell, now editor of the paper, stands by the decision. "By publishing the photos and the stories we are telling people what is going on, and that may contribute to public debate."
– J.S.