Images of suffering — either human or animal — can be immensely persuasive. In the nineteenth century, for instance, the antislavery movement made extremely effective use of images in its campaign. We reproduce two antislavery images earlier in this chapter, as well as a counterimage that sought to assure viewers that slavery is a beneficent system. But are there some images not fit to print?

Until recently, many newspapers did not print pictures of lynched African Americans, hanged and burned and maimed. The reasons for not printing such images probably differed between South and North: Southern papers may have considered the images to be discreditable to whites, while northern papers may have deemed the images too revolting. Even today, when it’s commonplace for newspapers and television news to show pictures of dead victims of war, famine, or traffic accidents, one rarely sees bodies that are horribly maimed. (For traffic accidents, the body is usually covered, and we see only the smashed car.) The U.S. government has refused to release photographs showing the bodies of American soldiers killed in the war in Iraq, and it has been most reluctant to show pictures of dead Iraqi soldiers and civilians. Only after many Iraqis refused to believe that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s two sons had been killed did the U.S. government reluctantly release pictures showing the two men’s blood-spattered faces — and some American newspapers and television programs refused to use the images.

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There have been notable exceptions to this practice, such as Huynh Cong (Nick) Ut’s 1972 photograph of children fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam (below), which was widely reproduced in the United States and won the photographer a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. It’s impossible to measure the influence of this particular photograph, but many people believe that it played a substantial role in increasing public pressure to end the Vietnam War. Another widely reproduced picture of horrifying violence is Eddie Adams’s 1968 picture of a South Vietnamese chief of police firing a pistol into the head of a Viet Cong prisoner.

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The issue remains: Are some images unacceptable? For instance, although capital punishment — by methods including lethal injection, hanging, shooting, and electrocution — is legal in parts of the United States, every state in the Union prohibits the publication of pictures showing a criminal being executed.¹

The most famous recent example of an image widely thought to be unprintable showed the murder of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Pearl was captured and murdered in June 2002 by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan. His killers videotaped Pearl reading a statement denouncing American policy and then being decapitated. The video also shows a man’s arm holding Pearl’s head. The video ends with the killers making demands (such as the release of Muslim prisoners being held by the United States in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba) and asserting, “if our demands are not met, this scene will be repeated again and again.”

The chief arguments against newspapers reproducing material from this video were as follows:

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Those who favored broadcasting the video on television and printing still images from it in newspapers offered these arguments:

But is the comparison of the Daniel Pearl video to the photos of the Twin Towers and the Challenger valid? You may respond that individuals in the Twin Towers pictures aren’t specifically identifiable and that the Challenger images, although horrifying, aren’t as visually revolting as the picture of a severed head held up for view.

The Boston Phoenix, a weekly newspaper, published some images from the Pearl video and also put a link to the video (with a warning that the footage is “extremely graphic”) on its Web site. The weekly’s editor justified publication on the three grounds we list above. Pearl’s wife, Mariane Pearl, was quoted in various newspapers as condemning the “heartless decision to air this despicable video.” And a spokeswoman for the Pearl family, when asked for comment, referred reporters to a statement issued earlier, which said that broadcasters who show the video

fall without shame into the terrorists’ plan. . . . Danny believed that journalism was a tool to report the truth and foster understanding — not perpetuate propaganda and sensationalize tragedy. We had hoped that no part of this tape would ever see the light of day. . . . We urge all networks and news outlets to exercise responsibility and not aid the terrorists in spreading their message of hate and murder.²

Although some journalists expressed regret that Pearl’s family was distressed, they insisted that journalists have a right to reproduce such material and that the images can serve the valuable purpose of shocking viewers into awareness.

POLITICS AND PICTURES

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Consider, too, the controversy that erupted in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, when the U.S. government decided that news media would not be allowed to photograph coffins returning with the bodies of military personnel killed during the war. In later years the policy was sometimes ignored, but in 2003 the George W. Bush administration decreed that there would be “no arrival ceremony for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning [from Iraq or Afghanistan] . . . to the Dover (Delaware) base.” The government enforced the policy strictly.

Members of the news media strongly protested, as did many others, chiefly on the basis of these arguments:

The chief arguments in defense of the ban were as follows:

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In February 2009, President Obama changed the policy and permitted coverage of the transfer of bodily remains. In his Address to the Joint Session of Congress on February 24, 2009, he said, “For seven years we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price.” On February 27, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced that the government ban was lifted and that families will decide whether to allow photographs and videos of the “dignified transfer process at Dover.”

Another issue concerning the appropriateness of showing certain images arose early in 2006. In September 2005, a Danish newspaper, accused of being afraid to show political cartoons that were hostile to Muslim terrorists, responded by publishing twelve cartoons. One cartoon showed the prophet Muhammad wearing a turban that looked like a bomb. The images at first didn’t arouse much attention, but when they were reprinted in Norway in January 2006, they attracted worldwide attention and outraged Muslims, most of whom regard any depiction of Muhammad as blasphemous. Some Muslims in various Islamic nations burned Danish embassies and engaged in other acts of violence. Most non-Muslims agreed that the images were in bad taste; and apparently in deference to Islamic sensibilities (but possibly also out of fear of reprisals), very few Western newspapers reprinted the cartoons when they covered the news events. Most newspapers (including the New York Times) merely described the images. The editors of these papers believed that readers should be told the news, but that because the drawings were so offensive to some persons, they should be described rather than reprinted. A controversy then arose: Do readers of a newspaper deserve to see the evidence for themselves, or can a newspaper adequately fulfill its mission by offering only a verbal description? These questions arose again after the 2007 bombing of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, and then after another mass shooting at the same newspaper in 2015 that claimed the lives of twelve editors and staff members.

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Persons who argued that the images should be reproduced in the media generally made these points:

In contrast, opposing voices made these points:

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