Duty vs care: Readers, journalists struggle with violent images January 20, 2005 By Ryan Pitts
Spokane Spokesman-Review
Newspaper readers and journalists agree that a complete news report can't ignore the disturbing sides of life, but readers are generally more conservative about when -- and where -- graphic photographs should be published.
Responding to an online survey, both groups said that challenging images sometimes describe reality in a way that words can't. Although few thought the public should be shielded from ugly truths, they all ran into similar concerns when deciding whether specific pictures should run.
Readers and journalists alike struggled to balance compassion and family privacy with a broader need for information. They saw value in unflinching descriptions of wartime brutality, but no one wanted to become a tool for terrorist propaganda.
Some of the shared values weren't abstract at all: How do I explain this picture to my kids?
PHOTO 4 April 17, 2004, Tami Silicio -- American Coffins
PHOTO 5 May 11, 2004, Associated Press - Nick Berg
Opinions were collected by the Associated Press Managing Editors National Credibility Roundtables Project, which involved more than 2,400 readers and 400 journalists who viewed five photographs, then decided where (or if) the images should be published. Subjects included tsunami victims, American soldiers and violence in the war in Iraq. In most cases, a majority believed the picture ought to be published somewhere in the newspaper, if not on the front page.
"Report the news as it happens and don't try to soft-pedal everything," said Wally Rayl of Cheyenne, Wyo. "How can people react appropriately to any given situation if they don't have all the facts; or if the facts are altered because someone thinks life is too graphic for us to deal with?... Not being able to face reality is a major problem in our society today."
Most respondents described gut feelings, though, telling them when that reality was too gruesome for publication. Many journalists invoked the so-called "cereal test," newsroom slang for a simple question: Would I want my family to see this photo at the breakfast table tomorrow morning?
This concept was especially important in determining whether pictures belonged on the front page, where readers may not have a choice about seeing them.
"There seems to be a complicated mix of information that makes a photo uncomfortable or even offensive," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at journalism's Poynter Institute. "Dead bodies are one thing, bloated, decaying bodies are another."
As readers and journalists judged an image's potential to cross that philosophical line, they showed a similar set of morals and fears. So why were media workers consistently more likely to publish the photos?
"It's probably safe to say that journalists as a group are more likely to ground their moral decisions in duty," McBride said in an email interview. "They believe it is their duty to inform. In the wider public arena, a greater portion of people are going to ground their moral decisions in care. That means they would be concerned about harming the people in the photos, as well as the audience who might view the photo."
But controversy can't become an excuse to avoid graphic images, she said. Sometimes fundamental journalism doesn't happen without them.
"It's impossible to tell a story of death and destruction on the scale of the tsunami without showing some pictures that include death and destruction," McBride said, which leaves newsrooms obliged to consider decisions carefully. And although journalists in the survey were concerned about the same things as their readers, a recent workshop left McBride with the sense that too few media outlets have translated these values into consistent procedure.
"The key is in having a healthy process for deciding which photos, how many, where they run, and what other contextual information is provided to the reader." McBride suggests leading off with a series of questions like "What's our journalistic purpose?"; "Who's in our audience?"; even "What harm could we cause by running this?" And bringing readers into the conversation, she said, can help find the right answers. CORRECTIONS
-Breakdown percentages were posted incorrectly on Thursday, January 20th-Monday, January 24th. The percentage scores represent responses from journalists and readers.
-The Tsunami victim photograph ("photo #1") was misrepresented on the "Full story" page Thursday, January 20th-Monday, January 24th. The wounded soldier photograph ("photo #3") was posted in its place. THIS READERS SPEAK SURVEY was sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors National Credibility Roundtables Project through its Reader Interactive initiative. A total of 29 news organizations sent email to about 11,000 regular readers, and 2,461 responses were received from 45 states and the District of Columbia. Editors involved with APME invited their staffs to answer the same questions, gathering 419 responses from 36 states and the District of Columbia.
The results are not scientific; readers who responded are likely to be among the more interactive that newspapers have. They were polled because they had given their email address to their local newspaper, and comments were taken only online.
THE NATIONAL CREDIBILITY ROUNDTABLES PROJECT is funded through a grant from the Ford Foundation, and is intended to help the media address the credibility crisis that exists with the public. The Reader Interactive initiative, as part of that project, has assisted newsrooms around the country in setting up reader email networks so that editors can be in better touch with readers. On occasion, the newsrooms involved in that initiative work together on a national Readers Speak survey such as this one.
Those responding to the survey about graphic news images were asked to view five photographs, then comment on where (or if) they would run the image. A breakdown appears below, with journalists' response rate on the left, readers' on the right. (The survey and images under discussion can be seen at http://www.apme-credibility.org/survey.)
