Questions of taste again
19/03/04 10:21 Media
issues
A couple of days ago readers might recall I was
looking at the ethics of pictures of the dead and
suffering in the Madrid bombing.
Yesterday I was travelling by train and saw the cover of London's Evening Standard. This goes through several covers a day as people may be aware, but this particular edition had a picture of newsreader Carol Barnes visiting the site of her daughter's untimely death (people unfamiliar with the story should know that her daughter died in a skydiving accident).
I was struck immediately by the motivelessness of publishing this picture. Yes we had to know what happened in Madrid. Yes there had to be pictures of some sort, I believe, on that occasion. But a picture of a grieving relative on the occasion of a freak accident, which isn't actually anybody else's business?
It was news, because something had happened. And the tragic event was duly reported earlier in the week. But it would have been a good time to back off, I'd have thought.
Yesterday I was travelling by train and saw the cover of London's Evening Standard. This goes through several covers a day as people may be aware, but this particular edition had a picture of newsreader Carol Barnes visiting the site of her daughter's untimely death (people unfamiliar with the story should know that her daughter died in a skydiving accident).
I was struck immediately by the motivelessness of publishing this picture. Yes we had to know what happened in Madrid. Yes there had to be pictures of some sort, I believe, on that occasion. But a picture of a grieving relative on the occasion of a freak accident, which isn't actually anybody else's business?
It was news, because something had happened. And the tragic event was duly reported earlier in the week. But it would have been a good time to back off, I'd have thought.
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