WHEN The Irish Timesran a picture last Friday on page one of a captured and clearly wounded Muammar Gadafy, close to death, some readers were outraged at our decision to use it. Some said the image was shockingly brutal and, particularly, that it was likely to upset children. Others argued that it was gratuitously invasive of Gadafy's own dignity.
The grainy mobile phone image of a bloodied and beaten Gadafy was by no means the most shocking either of those run by other newspapers and media outlets, or of the 40 or so available to us which editors in the paper debated in the hours before publication. The decision was not, and is never, easy. Sensitive to the feelings of readers and to our own professional code of conduct, editors start from a general presumption that close-up photos of the dead and bereaved, pictures of the faces of prisoners in captivity, and of excessively bloody wounded each have to be justified, when rarely used, by a strong overriding public interest case.
Sometimes that may require us to shock to convey the sheer brutality of war, a challenge made ever more difficult by the desensitising effect of fictional depictions of violence all around us in the media. The line of what may be acceptable is constantly shifting. At other times, the imperative to tell an important story that cannot be told any other way may legitimise the use of a particularly offensive or harrowing picture.
That is the case with Gadafy’s death. The very fact of his death, not believed by many until they saw the incontrovertible images, and its controversial manner after capture – executed, or caught in crossfire? – made the picture editorially justifiable, we believe, once sourced and verified as effectively as possible. The consequent shock and distress felt by some readers was unfortunate and the paper regrets it, but it was proportionate to the necessity of telling the story. Editors rejected the more brutal shots of the dead man – they could not tell us any more that we required to know about the story of the death than the picture we used. (In subsequent days, we also used a small image of his body, cleaned up, in storage in Sirte).
Whether the pictures are of a wounded Gadafy, the bodies of the executed Ceausescus, a dead Osama bin Laden, the torture of naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or sometimes just the death of an ordinary soldier or civilian, often they speak more eloquently, directly, and therefore more truthfully than words can of a brutal reality that journalism is charged with recording.