The newsroom is a puzzling place to many readers. How does the story of an afternoon rally on the Plaza find its way to page B-4 in the Metro section?
Who makes that decision and why?
Readers have lots of questions like that, but perhaps the most important one is this: Are we listening? Yes, we are. As readers’ representative beginning Monday, I’ll listen to your concerns, your praise, your gripes, your ideas – your compelling questions of “Why?”
One question readers raise repeatedly is why did we run – or not run – a particular photo? When photographers captured the graphic images of Saddam Hussein’s slain sons, Odai and Qusai, suddenly newsrooms around the world were faced with a unique decision.
The issue here is newsworthiness vs. graphic content. Editors pondered whether the international importance of the photos outweighed their grisly nature. Which was the more compelling argument?
The Star decided not to publish the photos and explained why in a story on Friday, July 25: “The Kansas City Star decided not to print the photos, based on the newspaper’s practice of not publishing graphic body images unless the news content is overwhelming.” Steve Shirk, managing editor for news, said in this case the news was not in the photos.
“What’s the intrinsic news value of the content of the photos?
To me, the news was that the military had released the photos, not the photos themselves,” he said.
Were we right or wrong? Other newspapers ran them. The Boston Globe did on page A-1, much to the dismay of angry readers. The Oregonian ran them on the front page in its afternoon edition, then moved them inside the next morning. The Detroit Free Press ran the photos inside the A-section, with a warning on A-1. Other papers made similar choices.
The Daily Union in Junction City, Kan., opted not to run the photos, but invited any reader to visit the paper and view the images. Of course, readers needn’t make a trip down to the neighborhood newspaper to see the marred bodies of the Husseins, when all they had to do was point and click.
As soon as the images were released Thursday, cable news shows and Internet sites scrambled to show the “death photos,” as they were called. Google News showed the photos at the top of its home page. Several newspapers – even those who refused to run them in print – ran the photos on their Web sites, The Star included.
Kansascity.com, the Web site of The Star, posted the images as part of a national news feed from its parent company, Knight Ridder Digital. (The Star did not refer to the Web site photos in the pages of the newspaper. We should have.)
I took another look at the photos last week – two head-and-shoulders shots of each brother, side by side. Alive. Dead.
My gut reaction? Honestly, I’ve seen worse in slasher horror movies.
However, real death and disfigurement of a human being must be held to a higher publishing standard than fictional gore.
I agree with The Star’s call, based on its news and photo publication policy. The news here was that the United States government released the photos to prove to all that Saddam Hussein’s sons were really dead. In a side note: The Hutchinson News in Hutchinson, Kan. (which didn’t publish the photos), wrote that the Bush administration complained when Iraq broadcast images of American POWs. And yet, the same government released even worse images to the press. Do you, as readers, think that matters in this case?
What would you have done? Publish? Decline? These are the kinds of decisions newspaper editors make daily, and the kinds of issues I’ll talk about in this column.
Trusting the newspaper to make these coverage decisions on your behalf is your call. Discussing why, and whether we got it right or wrong, belongs to all of us.
