Download Click here to a text version of this

Inside the First Amendment – 8.27.15
Understanding what we need to see — and do not
By Gene Policinski
Murder. Real. Live.
The shooting of two television journalists. Viewable from two perspectives, including that of the
gunman himself.
We saw — or could see if we wished, and apparently millions of us did — the awfulness of it,
immediately. And over and over and over again, on TV and online.
The news was that WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker and photographer Adam Ward were dead,
and interviewee Vicki Gardner wounded, during one of those all-too-familiar morning news
“live shots.” Shot multiple times by a man identified by police as a former colleague of Parker
and Ward, Vester Lee Flanagan II, who later fatally wounded himself as police closed in on his
car.
And then there were the videos. First, from Ward’s own camera, airing ”live” in all its
stupefying, banal-to-shocking 40 seconds or so as the interview turned into horror. Later, in
truncated bits and pieces, as networks and online news operations made individual decisions.
CNN didn’t show it, and then showed it with ample warning to viewers, and later not at all.
Other news operations stopped the videos just before the shooting started, or showed still
images taken from WDBJ7’s video.
Not so online, where for hours — and very likely, still, as you read this — the entire ghastly
episode played on.
And then, two videos posted on social media, apparently by the gunman himself, showing the
murders as he must have viewed them. They were taken down quickly by Twitter and Facebook
— as soon as eight minutes after posting on Twitter, one news account said. But a copy posted
on Facebook was reported to have 3,000 views “a few hours after the shooting.”
Once again, the questions arise: When does responsible journalism mutate into sensationalism
and voyeurism? When does a free press need to show — and society need to see — reality in all
its awfulness? And when is it just “what we do because we can?” For online sites, when does “a
right to do” lose its connection with “the right thing to do?”
Wednesday certainly was not the first time shocking images of violent death, often obtained for
the first time through new technology of the era, have dominated the news media — and both
stunned and fascinated the nation.
While Wednesday’s drama played out on social media and on the Web, it was a newspaper that
provoked criticism the next day. The New York Daily News cover showing Parker being shot
from the killer’s perspective drew a description of "death porn" from one media critic.
But Justin Fenton, a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun, told The Washington Post that
"the Daily News cover offered insight into a crime that prose can’t.” On his Twitter account, he
wrote, “NY Daily News cover is frightening but not gory. … Reaction at least on my timeline is
uniform outrage. … Personally … covering gun violence daily, I don’t think the words convey the
horror the way these images do.”
Early Thursday, a new tweet topped his posts: “Reports of 6 shot overnight, from 9 pm12:30am, including a double (non fatal) in Cherry Hill.”
A 1928 Daily News photo cover is a landmark item in the debate over what should or should not
be shown. Surreptitiously taken by a photographer who had hidden an ankle-camera under his
pants leg, the photo is said to show convicted murderer Ruth Snyder straining against her
bonds in the Sing Sing Prison electric chair as the current took her life. The result: nationwide
bans on photographers at executions that continue today.
Magazine photos of racially motivated lynchings brought that terrible practice into subscribers’
homes. And the then-new media of the 1950s and 1960s, by airing film of snarling dogs,
burning buses and fire hose streams blasting children, turned the conscience of a nation. Even
as the nation in 1963 mourned a president, midday TV showed us “live” the killing of his
assassin — 50 years later still an indelible moment for those who watched it.
In this newly interconnected global media hothouse, live images of violent death seem ever
more frequent; it was just one year ago that ISIS terrorists used social media to show video of
the beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steve Sotloff. Not long after, it was a hostage
being burned alive. On April 4, in North Charleston, S.C., a citizen video recorded the shooting
by a police officer of a man fleeing in a park after being stopped for a traffic violation.
Wednesday’s on-camera tragedy should bring a new level of concern and discussion over what
we can see, and whether we should see it — and how new technology may not only record and
distribute, but invite.
A few decades ago, TV journalists once debated whether to show recorded images of violence
and death, and then whether to build in several-second delays on “live” reports to allow for
such screening.
In 1987, when a Pennsylvania state official shot and killed himself at a news conference, editors
and news directors were in charge of deciding what we would see. And to a large degree, we
didn’t.
In contrast, within 60 minutes of the first reports of Wednesday’s killings, a network
commentator apologized online for not being able to describe in more detail the Roanoke, Va.,
station’s own video. As he explained, he was watching a blurry cellphone video of a TV image
showing a replay. But he, and we, could hear the shots being fired and the victims’ screams.
Online, the immediacy was entangled with the bizarre circumstance that the gunman’s own
cellphone video of the killing was posted. Reports are that, using his on-air ID, “Bryce Williams,”
Flanagan invited an online audience by tweeting, “I filmed the shooting See Facebook.”
USA Today reported that “at 11:14 a.m., Flanagan tweeted two short videos and posted a 56second video to Facebook” that showed him approaching Parker, Ward, and the person being
interviewed. The gun, in his right hand, comes into view — unnoticed by the trio until the
gunman fires. The Twitter text posts are updated six times in 20 minutes, according to The New
York Times.
In “frame grabs” that appear to be from one of those videos, published online by the British
newspaper the Daily Mail, Parker is shown reacting in shock as the gunman fires.
To be sure, as history demonstrates, there are times we need to see — and remember for
generations — what real terror and horrific events are like. Holocaust deniers can never
overcome the truth carried by stark images now preserved for the ages.
After the violence earlier this year in Baltimore that followed the death of an unarmed African
American man in police custody, a veteran journalism educator was critical of news coverage
“live” from the city streets that he felt misrepresented the scope of what some called “riots.”
“Live,” he said, “was no longer journalism, but just marketing” — a ploy to attract viewers, but
which added nothing to understanding the news.
There’s some theorizing already that each of these deadly real-reality shows prompt copycats
who are encouraged by the resulting media exposure, and then are driven to find new and even
more dramatic methods to capture the world’s attention. And then there are those in the
media who would rather shock than inform, valuing “click-bait” over information.
Once again, the challenge for journalists reporting on our behalf — and now for those retweeting and repeating the killer’s cold-blooded social media posts — is to find the balance that
lets us both see to understand and to understand what we need to see. And what we do not.
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of
the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow
him on Twitter: @genefac.