This is an edited transcript ...

Mark Brayne:

... This has been quite a distressing period; I scarcely need to remind everybody of that. I have put a couple of images of Beslan and of hostages in Iraq up on the plasma screen. The Dart Centre, as most of you know, is about furthering a climate in journalism in which journalists can report trauma and extreme human distress better, and also look after themselves and each other better in the process.

Some of you may have seen what we've put up on the Dart Centre website as draft guidelines for dealing with this kind of imagery, and I'd like to suggest that today we focus mainly on the impact on colleagues and our own culture. I'm sure also that issues of what we broadcast, and how images are fed to newsrooms and what is printed will also come into the debate ...

Before we start, I want to read out a couple of things — e-mails that came in as a result of the invitation. There's a note from Susannah Harrison who is now a psychotherapist as well but she comes from a photography background:

Please don't forget the backroom boys ... I did. I failed to consider the guys in our digital lab, cleaning up images for despatch to clients. They were usually eighteen to twenty-five year-olds, not necessarily well travelled who were sitting in a darkened lab in front of over-size screens, checking and cleaning images of often horrific situations, Rwanda, Afghanistan, 9-11.

It's one thing to be shocked at a still picture and be able to look away or move on to the next frame but quite another to have to face it in graphic detail for some considerable time. They were also seeing all the detail, which perhaps we might miss as we turn the page. It wasn't until one of the guys came to me and asked somewhat nervously if they really had to look at images like this — it was a massacre in Rwanda — that I realised what they were going through and we looked at ways of warning about content but I don't believe we truly resolved the issue.

I have a note also which I would like to read in a bit of detail, from Nael Shyoukhri, working with Reuters in the West Bank (Click here to read Shyoukhri's note).

I wanted to read that because it brought home to me the reality of what we're dealing with, from the sharp end, where people actually shoot it, right to the edit suite where people deal with it …

John Clarke, Reuters TV:

As an agency, we've obviously had to deal with disturbing video for many decades, whether that's Rwanda or from Asia or the latest material from Iraq. So we've had a policy of putting warnings on video for quite a long time. However, when the latest material started coming out of Iraq of the beheadings, we put that normal 10 or 15-second warning on our material, but it was Chris Hampson from NBC who asked us to try and extend that even further, which we did. We now put a five-minutes' warning on video the first time it's shown, and we try to ring-fence some of this material as well so that it's either run first or last in a feed, so we can give broadcasters the chance to turn off monitors or whatever they need to do to deal with that.

Nael is one of our cameramen and he's someone that we brought to London to receive some help over his personal circumstance. So there's been a lot of debate in the agencies over the years about what to do with certain types of video. But you're right, we're probably less experienced at dealing with how it's affecting our own staff, particularly in the field and that's a useful process.

Anthony Massey, Foreign Duty Editor, BBC News BBC News:

I just want to ask a question. We're been talking here about how, when the beheadings started and how terrible they were to see, APTN decided that they wouldn't actually put them on the feed at all. But Reuters still does and I wondered why you felt you still had to do that?

John Clarke:

I've spoken to a number of our clients over the last two weeks including the European Broadcasting Union about this, and certainly the EBU has taken the same line that we have which is, up until now, we do need to be putting this material out. One UK broadcaster said explicitly to me that they were using this material to prove, for their own reporting purposes, whether someone was in fact alive or dead.

I've also felt, if we were to have made a decision at the outset, at the first beheading, that we weren't going to run any of this material, that it would affect the way that reporters were going to report the story. I know a lot of stations are not going to use the worst of this material. But certainly as the campaign of beheadings happened, if we had not put out any of this material, it may have routinised it, or trivialised it in some way, if reporters could not actually see it and then describe what they had seen.

Anthony Massey:

Respecting totally what our Reuters colleague has said, from the BBC news desk we just see things completely differently. Personally, I've seen a lot of these events at first hand, as a field producer — as many people in this room will have done who spent years in the Balkans. I was in Rwanda and in the Middle East and various places — but the beheading videos in particular seem to come into a new and unique category that none of us have ever experienced before, and caused real trauma to colleagues in the newsroom. Initially you did take steps to produce warnings, which were very helpful. But initially that wasn't done as well as it is now, and so we were seeing things shown repeatedly, at length, without warning — first on Reuters then on Eurovision then on AP and everywhere you look.

Our newsroom is configured to bring in agency and Eurovision material and turn it round instantly. That's what we do and that's what we want; we buy that service from you because it's good and we need it — but everywhere you looked you just saw someone screaming and having his head sawn off, at length. It was in kind of nightmare vision and you couldn't get away from it.

So I now think that we're looking at two different categories of traumatic material. Firstly there is the beheading video, which is in a category of its own, easily defined, everybody understands it and which, certainly at the working, operational level in BBC News, more and more of us do not want to come into Television Centre at all, under any circumstances. We don't want it for verification; if a Reuters or AP journalist says they've seen it, then I believe them and we don't feel we need to see the stuff ourselves. Some of our managers don't take that view. We disagree very, very strongly with them.

So we don't want the stuff to come in at all; we don't want it for verification, we don't want it for the archive. There are very few kinds of video where I can actually say the BBC will never show it on any outlet, but we're never going to show that now and we're not going to show it in a hundred years' time. We just don't need it and we don't want it. And we would say to Reuters and AP and Eurovision and any other clients they have, [they] can book a unilateral and just get it fed to them straight; but it shouldn't go on a general feed to go out to everybody.

Now, very quickly, there is also the other category of all the other kind of traumatic video, however defined. That is much more difficult to deal with because the BBC itself has different views on how it handles that material depending on the time of day, depending on who's going to use it, whether it's going to go out on BBC World, whether it's going to go out on the evening 10 o'clock news rather than Breakfast. So there we need to discuss how we manage that kind of material as a whole and how it's distributed round the building; whether it needs to be quite as widely spread as it is

Mark Brayne:

Before Reuters come back on that, Brian Donald, from NBC who is I gather, pretty much in charge of the picture side of the NBC operations service here in London.

Brian Donald: NBC News

That's right and actually, I agree totally with the BBC. We have the same configuration; we have AP, Reuters and Eurovision coming in. I tend now to walk out the office, but it's coming in somewhere else so it's not very easy to avoid this and we don't use it. It's not my decision what we use, but NBC is never going to show the video and for me — I've been around for fifteen years or so — this has taken things to a whole new level. It's my job. I watch all these disturbing images all the time . But this hostage beheading is on a totally different level. I'm seasoned, but we've got kids in our office, teenagers, young men and women who are archiving this material and having to watch it and I can't imagine what it's like for them.

Mark Brayne:

What sort of impact is it having in the team, personally and individually and how are you responding to that?

Brian Donald:

Well, many people have come to me — editors, engineers, and satellite coordinators — and talked to me about it. I can say that NBC have actually been great and we've had people coming in to talk to us about it and ways of dealing with it, ways that we can deal with it at home. And actually just being here talking about it like this is a great way of helping.

Mark Brayne:

One of the things about this discussion is that distressing material has been coming into newsrooms for a very long time, but there hasn't been a conscious awareness about the impact that this is having on the people who deal with the images. So the discussion we're having tonight is very new.

I want to turn to Anna Averkiou, who was running the picture desk at the BBC at the time of 9/11; you've seen this unfold Anna, over a period going back to Yugoslavia some ten years ago.

Anna Averkiou: BBC

Yes, I've spent about 15 years watching all these images. I worked at Visnews, for Reuters and then at WTN, and then I joined the BBC and I can see the agency point of view because some clients will use it, and the agency isn't there to censor pictures. They're just there to pass them on — this is what's happening — and it's the broadcaster that decides how they're going to use them. I still, to a point, agree with that view and it's great that the health warnings are going on. But the beheadings do take it to another level.

At the BBC, I set up the picture desk and had a team working for me who were very young. My reaction was, ‘Oh, it's an arm, it's a leg, don't worry about it'. But unfortunately, September 11 happened and I was really very tired anyway. I was working crazy hours and I started having flashbacks of people jumping out of buildings and committing suicide. And then the flashbacks went back further to Bosnia and other things I'd seen over the years. So it does imprint. I was someone who used to joke about it, and I'd be drinking with everybody in the field and, you know, saying this is my job, it's exciting and we're telling people about what's going on.

I run the audio equivalent of the Picture Desk now, at the BBC World Service. But we are still watching the agencies coming in, because we're clipping audio. And I'm very aware that at Bush House, they do want to see some of these things just to be able to say, ‘Okay we'll take the editorial line on it.' But obviously, it's radio; we take a line on what audio we're going to broadcast, and someone has to filter it. And certainly with my team now, because of what's happened to me, I'm very aware to make sure that they get their breaks and we talk things through if they want to, but also keep that detachment to a certain point.

Stephen Whittle: Controller Editorial Policy, BBC

I think the hostage videos have taken it to an entirely different place, because I guess the dilemma up to now has always been about the distant, or rather not as personal an impact. But this is, after all, watching someone being literally killed, murdered before your very eyes. And it is indeed personal in a certain sense, in the way that many of the other images aren't. They may have been the result of actions but they're not as directly one to one as is happening here.

I really wanted, in a way, to go back to theory. We were talking in our pair about triangles, but perhaps it's a rectangle that has four points. One of those has to do with freedom of information and the peculiarity and the obvious difficulty of these things from Iraq — particularly especially within Britain, but also between the West and the Arab world. At the moment we say that we're not even prepared to consider receiving these images, there comes the cry, ‘Well, actually, that just proves what we thought. You're partial!'

Another point on the rectangle is obviously the person themselves, who is being degraded, dehumanised, treated most abominably. What is our responsibility towards them and how do we avoid, or seek to avoid, the obvious voyeurism. Related to that is what people have been talking about in terms of the people who are having to deal with it on everyone's behalf. People who may never, ever see, inevitably will never, ever see the image, but someone has to deal with it — and what the responsibility is there.

And the fourth point on the rectangle, is that these are very obvious pieces of manipulation being arranged by people who know exactly what they're doing and what the intended impact is. It's how you hold all those four things in tension, because I feel uncomfortable, instinctively uncomfortable, knowing that we will never, necessarily broadcast any of it. But in the end, of course, it also constitutes a record; a record of our inhumanity, one to another. And therefore I'm reluctant to say one should never even accept it even if one never actually uses it.

Barbara Probst: ex-BBC

I'm a former BBC journalist turned counsellor so I come at this from both sides. I sat and watched pictures over more than 30 years, appalling things that we haven't put out. And I'm beginning to question now, why we don't put them out; why we don't let the public decide. I'm playing devil's advocate because I can find all sorts of reasons why we don't. But we had to look at those things, all the people that sit in newsrooms have to look at those things. We can't be the arbiters for the rest of the world. The rest of the world put some of these things out, so who are we to censor what the public decide is good or bad? I am speaking here very much as devil's advocate, because I do know why I've stood there and looked at pictures over and over again and have said, ‘No, you cut there before his head's chopped off.'

Yes, you look at it the third time and the fourth time and the picture editor does as well and I've done that. And I am indeed going to save ‘the public' from seeing it. But I do worry why I'm doing that. I think there's maybe an argument to be had about that — not an argument, a discussion. About what we're protecting and what we're censoring the public from seeing.

But having said that, there still needs to be an awful lot of support for the people who do have to see it. We have to be able to say, I recognise that you can see it and I recognise that yes, with the adrenaline running you can watch it, you can do your job and you can be proud of the job you do; but at the end of the day you've got to be able to go home and go to sleep. How do we deal with that?

I think that the issues need to be separated. There's the political — why do we stop the public seeing what we see and what is happening. And okay, yes, it's manipulation by the terrorists, but we suffer manipulation by the politicians. They show us stuff that we need to see. I can remember during the last Iraq war putting out pictures of Iraqi prisoners being sat on the ground with their hands tied and blindfolded, and the next day Americans are shown being held and we're told we can't show them. Where's the fairness there?

I think we need to question how much the public are protected from the pictures that we see and why we're protecting them, and why they can't make their own minds up.

Edith Champagne: News Xchange

Just a point of clarification. The pictures of the beheadings that Reuters puts out come from the Internet, do they not? So the pictures are there already. I think the question becomes a little more complicated, because we're not the gatekeepers that we think we are any more; maybe for certain generations but for other generations we're not.

Tony Donovan: Reuters

I think, to my mind, we're getting to the nub of it, certainly from an agency perspective. I think this issue is about where you set the bar. If you're serving, as we are, a multicultural, multinational audience, where you set the bar is really difficult. I think it's perhaps a little easy to sit here and say beheadings are one thing but everything else is another thing because it's all the rest that we're going to have to deal with.

I think that what tonight should be about is not so much whether these pictures should be distributed, because it's going to happen. Whether it's Reuters or AP or Eurovision or the internet, it's going to happen. Pictures are going to be out there we can't stop it; nobody's going to be able to be the boy with his finger in that particular dyke. I think we have to focus on how we deal with that reality, including people saying to Reuters, ‘This is what we would like you to do.' We'll certainly work with the majority of people to try and arrive at a position that everybody's comfortable with.

But then it's how you try and protect your own people. Agencies have newsroom staff too who see the worst of this. I go back to the perfect example, the most horrible example, and that was the market bombing in Sarajevo. Our people saw pictures that we wouldn't send out, we just couldn't send out, because we were able to create and edit to tell that story leaving out the more horrific images.

Journalists have issues with this. But journalists are a little seasoned, a little hardened. We also have secretaries, ancillary staff, all of those people to take care of as well, so I don't think there's any great value in talking about should these pieces be out there — they're out there. It really is a question of how we deal with them.

Karen O'Connor, BBC:

One other thing to factor into the equation is that there is no unanimity about how people react to images; there just isn't. Whether you're a seasoned hack or not. I know a cameraman who has been through a lot, but he had a baby a year ago and suddenly everything he's going through is completely different to him — completely different. The world's changed beyond recognition to him so let alone the guy who's taking the feed in.

But picking up that point about the floodgates being open with the net. It is all out there. And as we move to a more integrated world between television and net broadcasting and broadband, there are some huge challenges facing us as gatekeepers to all of that because people access our material through itn.co.uk or bbc.co.uk; we're an internet provider as well. That's a big issue. In forums and chat groups it's a horrible fact, but people are starting to collect this kind of material and swap it amongst each other. So what are we going to do about that?

But the bigger question is, how do you have a system that is protecting people and giving them support when everybody is not having the same experience? I think you can either overdo it or underdo it, and that's something we all need to think about as well.

Mark Brayne:

In very practical terms, Chris from NBC and in the teams that you've got, what is making a difference, given that, as Tony says, this material is going to be around? There are decisions to be made about how much is passed on to the client, but it is indeed out on the internet so people can view it anyway; and given that people are going to be exposed to this, what can be done?

Chris Hampson: NBC Bureau Chief, London

I don't disagree with John Clarke. The agencies are there to distribute material. It's a question of how you distribute it. And then how we as broadcasters manage it within our own enterprises. The point about the Internet is quite right but of course, you have to log on to the particular site to see it. The problem that we had in NBC was that, as Brian has cogently pointed out, it affected people in a different way. You say people react differently to it and you're quite right. I've heard from other American managers along the lines of, ‘These guys are journalists — suck it up!' It's like a cop joining the police force who takes the benefits, does the traffic duty fine but when there's a shoot-out he wants to sit in the car; and that's not the way it is.

So there are different approaches to this. Our approach at NBC in London was to minimise the exposure of the bureau in its entirety to this video. We did that through talking to the agencies and asking them to not feed it in the middle of a feed unannounced, to put warnings at the beginning so that we could then establish a protocol within our own bureau that said, ‘When we know the feed is coming in we'll announce it on the tannoy.' We then put a system in place that involved the minimum number of people recording it. No-one had to watch the execution itself. We did all the technical checks beforehand and afterwards. So the reason for anyone to sit there and watch it came down to almost nil. I'm sure people do look at it but that's an issue for them, I think, more than anything else.

We don't archive it. We do prepare a section of it from the beginning before the execution in case anyone wants to use that, and that goes to the archive and the master copy is kept by myself or my deputy and is only handed out if it's asked for with a specific reason and then only in consultation with New York.

And because we're a smaller bureau, we're not the BBC and I guess if we tried to do this in New York, a comparative sized operation, it would be extremely difficult. But because we're a small bureau, we have managed to put some procedures in place to minimise it.

But I do share with Tony and John; I think it's right that you distribute it, because we are applying value judgements in everything that we do we do. But that's the decision that we broadcasters want to take.

...

Benedicte Paviot: Anglo-French Journalist with French Service of BBC

I worked with the BBC World Service for eight years and that is really one of the pertinent points that we came up with in our group because two or three people, we noticed, came up with that three-word expression — that it took it to a whole new level. I'd be really interested to hear what your definition is of ‘whole new level' because when I was working in the French Service covering the Rwandan genocide, there were all kinds of pictures, and we were hearing stories, and we were being the gatekeepers. We were broadcasting to Rwanda, broadcasting to Zaire, and at the risk of being slightly provocative, is it that we are we still more shocked by the loss of a white European-American life?

Of course I felt sorry for Ken Bigley and I'm lucky enough to have not seen that beheading. But I do think we need to look at what we mean by ‘whole new level' because we've been broadcasting a lot of pictures before. I think we do treat African-Asian lives in a completely different way than we do white European lives.

My personal view is that I don't think you're a lesser person because you decide that you're not going to watch that video. Clearly we do need some people who'll watch it; I think it should come with all kinds of health warnings.

Brian Donald:

I've worked in the business a long time and I think the expression ‘takes it to a new level' does have a certain meaning. We are voyeurs of a snuff video.

Mark Brayne:

Turning to you, Gavin Rees. You've been working on an extraordinary BBC documentary on Hiroshima, recreating the experience of August 1945 for a major docu-drama, going out on the BBC and several other stations around the world next year. You've been witnessing — recreating — some images of extreme trauma, not personal, individual violence one on one but the image of extreme, some of the most intense human distress imaginable.

Gavin Rees, BBC:

Yes, that's true. I'd like to say something first before going on to a more Hiroshima-explicit point. To go back to the videos, obviously I'm not working with this video material. I have in the past seen some snuff movies that were circulated by, I think it was it was GIA, an Islamic group in Algeria. People were killed and the point was to act as a recruiting video, so they were slitting people's throats in slow motion, showing this material to demonstrate to a young man what an extraordinary sense of power that you could have if you had the lucky chance to participate in this.

I found that material very disturbing, in a way I suspect, similar to the beheading videos. It made me incredibly angry; paradoxically being so disgusted by this, I found myself as a person going to a place where I stopped being the kind of liberal, anti-death penalty person I had been before. I immediately blanked into a point where I wanted these people dead, I wanted them killed for doing this — for doing these images.

So this leads me on to what I want to say, generally, about different kinds of trauma. And that's that it is very hard to say that one trauma is worse than the other. You see your children die, or whatever, or you witness somebody slowly killing somebody for fun. But it all has a different kind of flavour. And what is the flavour?

If somebody is being beheaded, one of the things that you as a viewer are doing is participating in the perpetrators' sense of power. You know they're getting off on it, and you know it's succeeding because you're watching it. And you're feeling all of those unpleasant feelings associated with it. I'm not saying that's any worse than American pilots, from a very safe distance, dropping bombs on people, as they did in Hiroshima in which hundreds of thousands of people saw people die around them or were killed themselves; it's a different thing.

And the second thing, going back to news, that I'd like to bring up, and working on the Hiroshima material. That is just the sense of fatigue. I've been working on this for six months and the first thing I did was have a month where I sat down and read all this stuff. I read stories and found people to interview who'd witnessed everybody around them burn to death; they were the only survivors. Everything had disappeared and they lost all sense of identity as well, because everything they knew, the places, the landscape — all gone, all burnt down.

You read that and you have an initial shock. And you think, ‘Oh God, this is absolutely dreadful.' You have bad dreams for a while or whatever — all of us have had quite bad dreams for the little period of time we started reading. It then goes away, you get habituated. I then went out to Japan and I interviewed these people. I had to sit in a chair opposite them for two hours and they told me about what had happened to them. Then there's a kind of spike and then it subsides.

Later on, we went back to Japan to film some documentary material and we went to the museum. There's a very good museum in Hiroshima. We'd also been shooting some drama before that so we'd started re-creating the scenes before the war. I remember walking round the museum with the director, and both of us were completely on edge. We'd been there before, we'd seen all the terrible pictures, but it had gone up a notch because we'd imbued it with more subjectivity because of the way that we'd taken people's stories and dramatised them.

Then after that, a month in the Polish countryside with a Polish film crew who had also worked on the film Schindlers List and various other things. All they do is export images of death for European and American cinema; they're specialists in turning around burns make-up very quickly, and sourcing the perfect latex corpses, all this kind of thing. It's a very, very strange environment to be in. It got to a point where I was going to Berlin as a garbage truck drove past — and I thought, ‘that's very strange, there's an arm sticking out of that garbage truck; what's it doing there?' I turned around and had a look and it was just a piece of cardboard.

But this is drama, we're recreating this stuff; these are synthetic, plastic corpses. One of the things I noticed during this process was just getting very, very tired, emotionally and feeling that my own personal issues were coming out. We're all talking about how people in news organisations look after their staff and are open and receptive, but they're working to very, very tight deadlines. We in contrast were a nice close documentary group where we get the chance to talk about feelings and try and deal with those things. But I doubt there's as much space for that in news.

Jonathan Miller:

I'm Foreign Affairs Correspondent on Channel 4 News. We've had a torrent of these images coming in, as everybody has in the last few months. And the deadlines, as you mention there, are a nightmare, because editorial decisions have to be taken in a split second about what can and cannot be broadcast and what is and what is not deemed suitable, particularly on our programme, which is going out at seven o'clock in the evening.

You also used the word, habituated, which is interesting and it compares to what you use generally, which is hardened; both of those words stick with me. I've been thinking a lot about this because of the sheer exposure to the violence of the videos that we've seen. I'm a journalist, I'm in this because I know what's going to happen, I know what I'm going to end up reporting. But I'm also very conscious of the fact that in the past few months I've turned into international Death And Destruction correspondent and you see images that you can never broadcast. They do stay with you; you become more sensitised, not hardened and there's a thing Anna pointed out, there's an accumulation of images that builds up inside you and you don't know at what point you are going to snap with that.

I've seen other people go over the edge on it. There was a woman who was producing with me one day during the Beslan stuff and streams and streams of material was coming in and we were putting the stuff together for the evening programme. She was a mother; I'm a father, so any parent watching that sort of stuff is pretty hard to take, but she snapped on that one.

I've seen other colleagues snap because they've known people, either because they've been taken hostage in Iraq and it's got to them personally or because they've just seen one too many bombs and one too many bodies. I think as all of us would agree, and as these Dart Centre notes point out too, no one person is the same as another; everyone's got different levels of tolerance to this material. I think those overseeing editorial policy have to be acutely aware of individual ability to cope. I don't think any one person who may be behaving absolutely normally as a journalist reporting well, looking healthy and balanced can necessarily remain that way.

Just to pick up on your point about this other level, I think the explanation for the phrase that keeps cropping up is the fact that this is violence designed for television. I think we're expected to see this stuff; we see it and that's why it gets to us because it's designed to get to you that way.

Mark Brayne:

Some very well put points, Jonathan. As an ex-journalist or recovering journalist, but also very much wearing my therapist hat, there are things that can be done to support people who are having to be exposed to this kind of material professionally and one of the things that can be done is monitoring the kind of radiation level; that's why in the guidelines I've suggested that we look on this as radiation. And people absorb radiation at different speeds. If you're working in the Chernobyl reactor or whatever, you're only going to be exposed to a certain amount, and you will be very carefully looked after and your radiation levels will be monitored.

Lots of very practical ideas we've put in here as well — little things like plants in the rooms and natural light and breaks. The smokers have an edge on it of course because they go out to get the fresh air and then ruin it but they've got something the non-smokers haven't got. I hope there are some practical, sensible, bolted-down ideas in here that might be useful for people who haven't seen them before.

We haven't got many therapists here tonight. That's by design, but there are one or two lurking in the undergrowth. I wonder whether Claire Hershman or Susie Sanders might have something to say, hearing this discussion and thinking about how individuals who have this kind of experience that Jonathan was just talking about can, most appropriately, support themselves. What they should do for self-care and what they should expect from their organisation and from their team?

Claire Hershman:

There seem to be two issues here. One is making sense of why you're in Beslan, why you're in Darfur. You have a reason for being a journalist. The other thing about Ken Bigley is that you were very passive; video was made for TV, it was sent to you, so you then are party to something else. In the one case, you're searching for an image, and you might get a decisive moment. In the other, the image is coming through from them to you, and you are in effect an instrument of obscenity.

Susie Sanders:

I agree that it's important to find a reason for things. Because when you get so many images, it's the accumulation and the meaninglessness of it all. If you can make meaning of it, it's different. It might be for history — there's a purpose for the journalist going out there to record something for history; or maybe to change a situation to make it better. But there is a point where so much is coming in you can't process it. Mark was talking about radiation. It's important to know how much you can process and to try to make sense of some of these images. In a way, a lot of them feel pretty senseless, particularly the beheadings, at the moment and we don't understand them culturally, perhaps.

Elmer Postle, freelance cameraman:

I'm curious to know what, as a culture, we're supposed to be listening to. Yes, it's abysmal and this is completely beyond the pale in some ways but also this is related — not the result — but it's related to British foreign policy. And one of the things that must drive people crazy, who monitor this stuff the whole time, is to be seeing a story which is related to our nation's behaviour yet not being able to report that it has come about because of that — because of a skewed understanding. It would drive you mad if you saw things that were happening that you could only report one angle on, and I think psychologically, that's a very difficult place to be. That's my thought.

Mark Brayne:

Thanks Elmer. As we approach the end of the discussion, I'm aware that a lot of ideas and observations and thoughts have been put into the room. In a sense though, at this point, there can be no conclusive end to a discussion like this and I hope that some good ideas have stimulated some thought.

I'd like to conclude by asking some of the senior colleagues from the organisations that deal with this material if you would like to offer some thoughts about conclusions that you might take away from tonight that could make a difference in policy. How this material is handled and approached, and also internally, within your teams, the kind of messages that might be sent out within the organisational culture. Because in any organisation, the message that comes down from the top is critical in determining how open people are to addressing issues like this in a constructive way.

Robin Elias: Managing Editor ITV News

I've found it all fascinating stuff and I'm glad that at the end we moved on more to what we can do about it rather than how big the problem is. I think we're all agreed that the problem is immense. I'll just say that I think newsroom technology now is moving to make it a bigger problem still, because the whole point of server technology in a big newsroom is that everybody has instant access to material whereas it used to be just the editor, the producer and the reporter. The whole point of server technology is that you've got 200 terminals around a building that everybody has instant access to and I think agencies being very aware of that will be very useful.

I don't subscribe to the view that we don't want to see the material anyway. I think drawing the line as to what is acceptable and what isn't I would prefer in my case for ITN to be making that decision not Reuters or APTN. An example I thought of during our discussion was that if Saddam is executed, would we want to see that picture or not? We wouldn't broadcast it, but we'd want to see it, and we'd want to be able to tell our viewers that we'd seen it and to put a journalistic spin on it. I think it is the journalist's job to see very unpalatable and horrific images and to use that information — not necessarily to relate what they've seen but to put that information in context. And certainly anecdotally, I know that people who know about my access to the Bigley beheading — I haven't seen it — but people are fascinated by it and want to know if it exists — just to know more about it.

A final point. I would have liked more information or examples of how different organisations allow their personnel to cope with seeing these images. I think it's obviously the frontline people who are important. But certainly in our organisation, a big organisation, what I fear is that the people out of view, not necessarily in the newsroom but perhaps working in the vaults or logging down in archive that we don't see — I think the radiation example is very good — are looked after. I work in the newsroom all the time but I think we should all be very aware of the people we may not see but who, because of the new technology, have access to the material.

John Clarke, Reuters

No more than an aside. I think that current technology is an issue but future technology is going to make it easier. I think this is a phenomenon, if you like, of streamed video. I don't just mean streamed on the internet but linear video, and I think that increasingly, as you get video delivered as a file that you have to open — somebody made the point that you have to go on to the internet — that will happen with agency video and Eurovision video. So I think there is help in terms of the technology, as well.

But overall, the thing I take away from this evening more than anything else is, I guess sometime over the last two, three, four years we got to the point where journalists in the field could come back and say they needed help. It was okay to say you needed help; it was okay for people to feel that they were no longer under pressure to be seen as tough and to be seen as hard. I think what we're seeing now is that being moved into the newsroom, and that perhaps we've been slow to realise it's the same issue; it just isn't quite as stark. Whether these guidelines are comprehensive enough isn't really the issue; just having guidelines reinforces that message, it sends that message out there to our staff.

It's not just about the beheadings. Somebody made the point that personal association with a particular image could cause the problem; it's okay to say that. It's okay to feel that in the newsroom if you don't want to look at a particular piece of video, if you don't want to be involved in the handling of it, you should say so. I think that's the key. We're taking the same attitude that we have towards field operators to newsroom journalists.

Stephen Whittle, BBC:

I just want to think a little bit about one word, and the word is ‘witness'. I think we do have a responsibility to be witnesses and that is both a vocation and also a burden. I think as witnesses we need to attend to various things: one is to the telling of the story and to recounting what has happened, because that is a very important part of being human. But the other thing we obviously need to attend to is ourselves, and to those who work with us. And I think the value of the discussion has been to remind us not just of ourselves but also the people already mentioned who we tend to forget, who are not as visible but who are equally being forced into the role of witness, which isn't something they necessarily have chosen but which they also need help with.

Chris Hampson, NBC:

Well, I take the point of the importance of being a witness and it leads to one of the other points raised, too, which is then the sanitisation process that we seem to get engaged in. One of the things that surprised me when we worked as a group and we were discussing the execution video with outsiders, outside the industry that is, is that they were unaware of how horrific, how long it had taken, how brutal, how amateurish it really was. To some extent we do a disservice if we overprotect our viewers from this. So I think it raises much bigger issues for us.

But I also agree that it has made us aware. We tend always to focus on the sharp end of the job, the people out in the field. We haven't paid enough attention to those at the receiving end back at base. I came back from vacation after the first of the execution videos and it was the one issue my staff wanted to talk to me about. And these were a bunch of very experienced and very good people; also some very inexperienced people and that's why we took it very seriously. So I think that we are seeing a welcome awareness in some media companies of the need to take into account the difficulties faced by other members of staff.

Someone in my personal family working in the archive in NBC and a recent joiner was physically nauseated by the first execution video she had to log. Why? We're never going to use them. So I'm in favour of managing the system as best we can to minimise the exposure to our staff. I also believe in witness, but I am concerned that we also have a duty to our viewers — yes to protect them, but also to inform them.

Mark Brayne:

Chris, thanks very much and thank you all very much for what I've found to be a very stimulating and valuable debate. Use these guidelines. Please feel free, needless to say, in organisations or passing them on among colleagues; please feel free to use them. It would be nice if you could acknowledge the role of The Dart Centre in bringing this together. At the Dart Centre the way we see this unfolding is that we are a resource, a place for people to meet to exchange best practice at what is the leading edge of this awareness. This awareness is absolutely new. It's the folk in the newsroom who need to be taken into account as well as those at the front. A lot has changed over the last five or ten years, but there's still got a long way to go ...