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NEW YORK — Media experts agree that violent images need to be displayed in proper context. However, providing that context can be a difficult task.
Discussing coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Brooke Gladstone, of National Public Radio's On the Media, noted the near impossibility of including that conflict's 5,000-year historical context in news coverage. She asked: "How on earth do you ever tell the story to anybody's satisfaction when the feelings run so deep and the history is so long?"
Providing context can be even more difficult for television journalists, who often rely on feeds recorded by other news organizations, said Al Jazeera United Nations correspondent Abderrahim Foukara. "Television is a strange beast," he said. "You basically do not always have the room for providing context."
"In television, the picture leads you," he said. "You write to the picture. And sometimes you write to the picture that is available to you. And the kind of picture that may explain the broader context of the story that you're doing is just not available to you so you go with what you have."
Gladstone and Foukara were part of a discussion April 14 at the City University of New York Graduate Center Recital Hall. The panel, moderated by Gladstone, included David Gelber, CBS executive producer; Mary Anne Golon, Time magazine picture editor; Vin Ray, the BBC's deputy head of newsgathering; and psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton.
The discussion was held after presentation of the 11th annual Dart Award for Excellence in Reporting on Victims of Violence to a team from the Providence Journal, and presentation of the Dart Center Distinguished Media Leadership Award to the BBC.
The Fallujah Images
Much of the panel's discussion centered on the images of mutilated corpses in Fallujah, Iraq.
"The power of what happened is not just in the body parts," CBS's Gelber said. "The power is in the distance between what you've been told by our governors about the reception that Americans are going to get in Iraq and what we see."
News media should attempt to probe beneath the surface of such horrific events, Lifton said. "One direction that could be helpful is focusing on motivation," he explained. "You have to report it, on the one hand; and yet you can avoid stereotyping by getting at motivation."
"If we focused almost exclusively on whether or not the images are seeable by any particular group we lose the significance of what the images represent," Lifton said. "That's why we always should put it in some kind of narrative, some kind of story."
Ray, of the BBC, said that attempts by journalists to tell a balanced story when reporting on such complicated events often lead to a lack of context. "When you try to balance things up in a very short period of time, there's just no time for context in the story," he said. "Let's have the case for one side at some point, and the case for the other side at another." Ray described watching two such stories by the BBC about the genetically modified food debate: "I learned so much more about the debate watching those pieces than I did watching the internally balanced ones."
The panelists also expressed surprise that many news organizations chose not to display the most graphic images from Fallujah. Among those organizations was Al Jazeera.
Recently, Foukara said, "Al Jazeera has been sort of shying away from showing the real gore of what's been happening in Fallujah and other parts [of Iraq]." He said people have asked him: "What's happening to Al Jazeera? This is not the Al Jazeera that we know."
Foukara said the Arabian network's cautious approach is likely the result of the controversy that followed Al Jazeera's decision last year to display images of dead U.S. troops in Iraq. "The reaction was so strong here in the United States," he said. "Some Americans found it so objectionable that the Al Jazeera correspondents at the stock exchange were actually kicked out of the stock exchange."
Gelber warned against news media playing a "nanny role of protecting the public from the reality of what's happening. For me, the presumption should be on the side of showing it."
Have News Media Become More Cautious?
Gelber suggested that reluctance to show the photos was a sign of a long-term trend. "It struck me that the level of censorship, in fact, has increased over the last 10 years," Gelber said, after noting that most networks did not hesitate to display very gruesome images from Somalia 10 years ago. "Why would this be?" he asked. "Why are we censoring these pictures more than we did 10 years ago?"
Time's Golon agreed that news media have become more cautious and conservative with graphic images in the past 10 years. She said that the magazine chose images from Fallujah that were much less graphic than those used 10 years ago in coverage of Somalia.
Ray described a similar trend at the BBC. "If you look at the coverage of the IRA attacks in London in the 1970s, and even as recently as the material we showed of the Iraqis being killed at the end of the last Gulf War," Ray said, "They're much more graphic than we would use now." A turning point in the British network's policies about graphic images came in 1991, with a "report from Burundi about a school where the children had been locked in and they were set on fire," he said. "It ran as the lead story on the one o'clock news, and it guaranteed the biggest volume of complaints that BBC News had ever had. And that in turn, guaranteed a debate within the BBC."
How Much Violence Can the Public Tolerate?
Foukara noted that U.S. audiences seem to have different sensibilities and tolerances than Arab and European audiences. "There's obviously a large discrepancy in the sense that Arab audiences over the past three years have been exposed to violent images from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians in perhaps an unprecedented way," he said. "And the consequence is that a lot of Arabs would tell you that in one way or another they have been almost immunized against violent images and there fore their tolerance threshold has been largely expanded."
Foukara also noted that European audiences are able to draw on their colonial history to provide their own context. "Europe has a colonial history that means that, when you try to explain a foreign story to a European audience, they already have the historical and the cultural baggage that saves you, as a reporter, part of the road that you have to go to explain the story," he said. "Americans do not always have that advantage."
Several of the panelists questioned claims that audiences aren't able to tolerate violent images.
Gelber said: "I don't think that we know, or think there's a clear formula about whether violent image attract or repel audiences."
"The thing that interests me is how we actually know what audiences can tolerate, because I don't think we really do know that," Ray said. "I think there is scope for doing quite a bit of work on what audiences can tolerate and why, because all we know is from our letterbox."
"People are always making judgment about what a particular audience can tolerate, without really knowing," Lifton said. "We have to find that space between being squeamish and encouraging what I call psychic numbing or suppression of the experience on the one hand, and at the other extreme a kind of pornography of violence."
Lifton emphasized the importance of placing violent images within a narrative and warned against showing such images in isolation. When the images are isolated, it's easier for an audience to rely on stereotypes and form an over-simplified view of an event.
There has been, Lifton said, a "hopeful direction" in recent coverage. "I think there's a little bit more attention being given to Iraqi suffering, just in the last few weeks, perhaps," he said. "I think that represents some sort of trend of opening out and critical perspective on the part of the American public that's being reflected in the media."
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