When 5-year-old Michelle Nellis goes to pick up the morning newspaper as a favor for her mother, Julia Nellis wants to make sure she never sees another bloody picture on the front page.
After her daughter retrieved the paper and saw one in April, the Beaverton mother protested to The Oregonian.
“I don’t want to see dead, bloody bodies on the front page,” she says. “If you put something like that on the front page, you’re usurping parents’ ability to keep that kind of material from their child.”
Those sentiments resonated across the newsroom last week as the newspaper’s editors debated whether to put the pictures of dead bodies from Iraq and Liberia on the front page of the newspaper.
The debates reflected many dynamics that play out daily in The Oregonian newsroom: the conservative nature of the newspaper’s front-page decisions. The power of a single photograph. The extent and limits of discussions among editors. The subjectivity of news judgment.
And the influence of readers.
In the end, the newspaper served and respected readers sensitive to pictures of bodies such as Nellis, but may have failed, at least in the case of the Liberia photos, to inform and engage as many readers as possible in a critical decision in a democracy.
Editor Sandy Rowe initially argued Thursday that the news value of the photos of the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons seemed to trump the newspaper’s usual reservation to publish pictures of bodies on the front page. “The photos were released by the government as a piece of important information in the war,” she says. “We are not in the position of hiding information.”
Rowe ordered the photos on the front page in the Thursday edition for lunchtime street sales, but wanted editors in the morning news meeting to discuss that decision and to consider play for the next day’s paper. In a rare and informal show of hands, slightly more than half the editors supported putting the pictures on the front page.
At the meeting and throughout the day, many editors questioned the news value of the pictures, especially given that they were widely available on the Internet and television 24 hours before readers would receive their papers. They argued that the government released the photographs to inform the people of Iraq, not necessarily Americans.
Others questioned if playing the photographs on the front page simply served the government’s propaganda interest, with little new information for readers. That could be inconsistent and jarring for readers, especially after the newspaper ran only one front page picture of Iraqi citizens killed in the war and Americans protested the handling of pictures of U.S. prisoners of war.
A few editors also said they were squeamish that the newspaper might be cooperating in what was essentially the exhibitionism of a prize of war. “It’s like putting people out there like the Old West, and saying, ‘we got ‘em,’ ” says Sally Cheriel, assistant team leader of the Family and Education Team.
By Thursday afternoon, John Harvey, who oversees the national and international wire services and had not been present for the morning news meeting discussion, downplayed the story. Harvey indelibly remembers the newspaper hearing from 500 readers the day he ran a picture showing the body of a child in the back of a truck after Mount St. Helens erupted.
At the afternoon news meeting, in which story-play decisions for the next morning’s editions are made, Harvey did not even pitch the story for Page One. “They released the photos for the people of Iraq,” he says; “99 percent of Americans had accepted the fact that they were dead.”
Therese Bottomly, the managing editor for news who makes Page One decisions, put a story of the release of the photos on the front page, but ran the photographs on an inside page. Bottomly, who also did not attend the morning news meeting, says the news value declined through the day because the photos were released early Thursday morning and the stories that moved on the wire offered little information beyond the fact the photos were released. “The story is barely a front page story,” she says. “I don’t think the news outranks the likelihood that many readers will find them distasteful.”
Concern about the grisliness of photos also influenced the decision to put a picture of bodies stacked in front of the U.S. Embassy in Liberia inside the Tuesday newspaper instead of on Page One.
Patty Reksten, director of photography, was among several editors who argued to put the photograph of bodies from Liberia on Page One.
“It is a hot spot in which it has been suggested that the U.S. go to help with unrest, and I don’t think the problem is as understood out there by readers,” Reksten says. “It’s one thing to read an article about something, it’s another to see a picture. It’s visceral. It’s bringing it to the forefront.”
When top editors first were reluctant to consider the photo, visual editors made mock front pages with the controversial photograph.
When considering disturbing photos, Reksten always asks: What should the public know? How important is the story? What is the newspaper’s role in educating the public?
“When something like this happens in the world, it’s the newspaper’s role to inform the public,” she says. “I think that’s an important function.”
But Executive Editor Peter Bhatia says that he considers the newspaper to be a guest in readers’ homes each morning. If it is going to show up with an image that will upset readers, there must be a hugely compelling news reason for doing so.
At times deaths in Iraq met his test. A baby being carried from the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing met it.
“Does the gravity of the news rise to putting something as graphic as that on the front page?” he says. “Sometimes it does.”
Bob Steele, the senior faculty member in ethics at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla., says the newspaper should be rigorous in bringing competing values to bear when weighing photos while always seeking ways to get vital information to the public.
“It’s the obligation of a newspaper to respect its readers, and part of that respect is giving readers substantive, meaningful information about significant issues and events, whether it be from Liberia, Iraq or downtown Portland,” he says. “Part of that respect is understanding the values of your readers and citizens in your community. We should not unnecessarily offend people; however, there are times when the value of certain information, photographs, words or pieces of information may be so essential that we accept that some readers will be offended.”
The Oregonian seemed consistent in its decision-making in both cases, even if the process might have been balky. The news value of the photographs was weighed against the potential to upset readers and, ultimately, the newspaper found a way to convey the information to readers by running the photographs inside.
Editors held several conversations about the photographs to try to test the running of the photos against the value of the information to the public. But individual news judgments can hold large sway. In the case of the Liberia photo, the force of Bhatia’s opinion and authority seemed to drive the decision. And Harvey’s evaluation of the news value of the photos of the slain Iraqis seemed to all but settle the debate.
I also questioned the relative news value of the Iraqi photos by Friday morning.
But on the Liberia photo, I concurred with several editors who argued that the newspaper missed an opportunity to attract readers with information through a front page photograph that could help them decide whether the United States should get involved in Liberia. To me, that journalistic value of the information outweighed the potential harm of offending readers.
The fact that demonstrators had stacked the bodies lent less credence to issues of violating privacy, a key consideration, especially when considering disturbing local photographs. Editors also had taken care to select a photograph that emphasized a witness’s sadness, not the bodies. The strife of a country with a shared history with the United States still is not well known among most readers, and the photo offered an opportunity to draw interest in a topic that soon could be of utmost importance to Americans.
But Bhatia believes the newspaper achieved that goal through placing a picture of violence in Liberia and a related story on Page One, and running the photos of bodies inside the newspaper.
Nellis, for one reader, is glad it did.
She did not mind hiding the newspaper from her daughter after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because she considered that an act of war against the country, on our turf. And Nellis says there might be extremely rare instances when the newspaper should show bodies on the front page — but she doesn’t even want to begin to imagine them.
“I am proud of the newspaper’s decisions” about the photographs this week, she says. “I don’t have a problem with running them in the paper inside. At that point, it becomes of matter of somebody choosing to turn to that page.”
TO SEE PHOTOS: To see the photographs considered for coverage of Liberia for The Oregonian for Tuesday and photographs of the dead sons of Saddam Hussein considered for Thursday’s street-sales edition and Friday’s morning editions, please see www.oregonlive.com/special/oregonian.
