When is a photograph too gruesome?

Nov 15, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column

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There is a thing among people. They would tell the world that they do not like bad news. As a reporter and an editor, on numerous occasions I have had to defend some decisions to members of the public.
I still recall the Kaieteur News front page on the morning after the Lusignan massacre. Indeed the pictures were gruesome and the comments ranged from support to naked criticism. People talked about hiding the paper from their children; some vowed never to buy the paper again and some described the editorial staff as being heartless and callous.
I met with a member of the Canadian International Development Agency—CIDA—and during that meeting the CIDA official explained to me that sometimes, photographs encourage even more brutality. She said that there has been research to indicate that people try to outdo the other.
I was not privy to the survey and since I could not prove it I accepted. I went back to the newspaper and after a meeting we took a decision that we would tone down the violent photographs.
We decided that violent criminals who are gunned down would make the front page. We also said that in the case of innocent victims we would spare the relatives the gruesome details.
Of course, some images do not go away. They are like reputation. If a man was once a thief and he decides to go straight, people would always see him as a thief. An individual who is deported from a foreign country would always be a deportee and there is a stigma to that designation.
So it is with Kaieteur News. People expect the worse. There would be the set who are opposed and the set who would always want to see. There is the case of some people going to a murder scene. The police would say that the image is most gruesome. Believe it or not, the more the word goes out of the gruesome nature of the victim, the greater the number of people who would want to see.
So it is with the newspaper. Something happens and the reading public expects Kaieteur News to have the story and the pictures. On the eve of the publication the management would notice a spike in the orders. That is how we are. I have seen people force their way through the crowd to get a glimpse of whatever is there in all its gruesome glory and faint.
This brings me to a recent photograph. Someone was sickened by the fact that a teenager was horribly tortured and did everything to let the facts get out. With its reputation, it came as no surprise that the approach was made to Kaieteur News.
We held it for a day debating whether we should go for the shock effect or whether we should bow to the criticisms that would follow a gruesome publication. We opted for the first.
There were no criticisms instead; the whole country and even people from afar gravitated to the newspaper. There were protests against the torture; pity for the victim and praise for Kaieteur News. How can one explain the radical turnaround? One view is that the victim was alive and therefore the photograph was all right.
If that is the case, then the images of death are what people find scary. No one wants to die and so there should be nothing to suggest that people actually die.
The teenager is out of hospital and the entire country is up in arms against the people who set him alight and disfigured him. But it is the image that I find most interesting. I have seen the unedited photograph on Face book and on those computer networks that allow people to disseminate their views.
I can also say that online viewers of Kaieteur News soared to more than 70,000 in the wake of the publication of that photograph of the tortured teen. It is clearly a case of people wanting to see whatever is there and so makes a determination of what their action will be.
It is not an easy task selecting photographs from crime scenes. I have been criticised from shunning the gruesome. One man called me to say “I don’t buy your newspaper to see Sunday School children.” I got his point.
But there are those who would say, “Please spare me the gruesome details.”
President Bharrat Jagdeo was moved to complain that there is too much crime reported in the pages, that in other countries crime is hidden. I am not sure that such is the case given the internet and the desire for people to share their story.
On the issue of the crime reports, I have heard people say that it is wise to hang everything out rather than to paint a false image and have people come to Guyana and suffer.
What is the balance? I suppose that it is left to me. We do not zero in on crime, though. People have come to expect Kaieteur News to report on everything under the sun. The photographs of white elephants have also been equally well received, as have been the photographs about the overpriced contract projects.
But it has always been human suffering and misfortune that has sold the paper. The reports on the violence that followed the 2002 Camp Street jailbreak pushed Kaieteur News to the top of the class. There were slain gunmen. For every reader who shunned the paper about four decided to gravitate to it.
The readers have not seen the last of the photographs yet, although the blood has been watered down.

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