“When does our service as practitioners of the ‘news event’ give way to our obligations as emotional, involved human beings?” With those words, in a recent Boston Globe story on coverage of the massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, one journalist defined a major fault line between the public and the media.
Several recent Page 1 Globe photos raised the same question. When — in the name of privacy and decency — do you turn the cameras off? The March 15 photo of Travis Roy sobbing at his press conference triggered hundreds of calls from readers accusing the paper of stripping him of his dignity. Two days earlier, a photo of the grief-racked grandparents of two young Brockton boys killed in a fire prompted readers to ask why their pain belonged in the public domain. (I was far more disturbed by the intrusive Brockton photo than the sight of Roy’s tears. And the March 29 photo on Page 3 of a man grieving over his slain brother in California seemed gratuitous.)
Given the incredible emotional power of photographs — and particularly color photographs — readers are entitled to know: What, if any, are the rules?
Globe editor Matthew V. Storin acknowledges that when it comes to controversial photos, there are guidelines but “very few hard and fast rules…. We’re not trying to shock people for the sense of shocking people.”
Photos with that potential impact are approved, he adds, “if there’s an overriding reason for the importance of the story.” There are also distinctly different rules governing events that occur close to home and those that happen in far-off places. (When the Atlanta Constitution ran the Roy photo, there was no protest there, suggesting that familiarity breeds emotional bonds.)
The Globe’s blueprint is pretty much standard fare for the business. A handbook of journalistic ethics (please, no oxymoron cracks) from the Society of Professional Journalists includes lofty-sounding principles like “minimize harm.” In reality, that translates into judgment calls by journalists who often have different views of what’s fit to print than their readers.
Garry Bryant is a photographer for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. Before clicking away at a crime or accident scene, he asks himself: “Is taking their picture going to put that person in greater trauma?” Yet he didn’t think twice about capturing a fainting mother as she arrived on the scene of her daughter’s drowning death — a photo that outraged many readers. “It was essential to the telling of the story,” he says.
Walker Lundy, editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, says “we don’t run dead bodies” as a general rule. But that didn’t stop him from using a plane to get a photo of a car with the bodies of a teen-age boy and the man who killed him and then committed suicide. (Readers could see the suicide note, weapon and the legs of both occupants, but no faces or blood.)
“It was not gory, and it
