The proverb tells us a picture is worth more than 10,000 words. The impact of some pictures, however, should be measured not in words but in hammers — sledgehammers.
Some pictures batter us. They jar our emotions. And they often drive home a point more forcefully than any amount of text.
Pictures such as the front-page news photo that greeted readers of The Spokesman-Review a week ago Saturday.
The color photo, four columns wide by more than 7 inches deep, showed a victim being carried away from the site of a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. He was on a stretcher, his clothing was shredded and his face, body and exposed legs were splattered with blood.
It was too disturbing for some readers, who called or wrote to protest.
Even one senior editor of the paper said she covered the photo as she read the rest of the front page.
“If they showed something like that in a movie,” one 13-year-old wrote, “the parents would probably be forewarned by the ratings and would not allow their children to see the movie.”
Photo Editor John Sale was not surprised that The Spokesman-Review received such reactions. He expected them.
Motion picture director Steven Spielberg was quoted once as saying that if his film “Schindler’s List” had been deemed entertaining, he would have failed.
Like Spielberg, Sale chose the graphic news photo not to entertain but to show readers a reality, albeit an uncomfortable one.
“It was the big news of the day,” he recalls. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Jerusalem at the time of the bombing, near enough to hear the explosion. The incident forestalled Powell’s planned meeting with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and was a clear disruption to his peace-seeking efforts.
In Sale’s mind, Powell’s presence and role in the region underscored the U.S. stake in the conflict and gave the story heightened local interest.
“It also showed, I think, the level of violence,” he said.
Sale said some of the wire photos available that day were more graphic than the one he picked and some less so. After making his selection, he consulted with several colleagues, including another photographer, the news editor and the page designers. He invited them to talk him out of using it.
“It got to a point where it was unanimous. That really was the picture of the day,” Sale said.
A photograph’s power to convey information and arouse emotions is a two-edged sword. It can deepen readers’ understanding, or it can unsettle them to the point of rage. The Spokesman-Review has been reproached on numerous occasions for the latter result. Other newspapers have, too.
“A photo tends to be very visceral,” Sale said. “It kind of hits you in the gut.”
The danger is that the gut punch overwhelms the reader’s ability to focus on the story itself. In this case Sale thought a strong message was called for, “to show what this means in terms of human suffering.”
In fact, had shock been his motive, Sale has far more graphic pictures to choose from just about any day. This one contained a conspicuous amount of blood but no dead bodies and no severed body parts.
One photo that came across Sale’s desk in the past week showed a Palestinian holding up a human foot that had been recovered from rubble in Jenin. Captions for several wire photos referred to searchers combing through “human debris.”
Those pictures weren’t used in The Spokesman-Review.
Editors like Sale have a balance to strike in attempting to tell a story honestly. Avoid gratuitous gore, but don’t be so protective of readers that you shield them from a full understanding of events.
Some days that leads to grim images like the one that appeared last weekend.
“I wouldn’t say you should see it every day because you can become numb to it,” Sale concedes.
At times, though, when the news is harsh, the stories and pictures that relate it will be, too.
When journalists talk about news judgment they are describing, by definition, a subjective process. There is ample room in that process for difference of opinion. Within broad parameters it is difficult to label a particular choice as right or wrong.
The important thing in this case is that the decision was made with an awareness of the potential for consequences. It was weighed against the news context in which it was presented and it was submitted to challenge by others.
