h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I just posted this elsewhere:

"Lets face it, it's a horrible fact, but the reason we're all so upset about this is because we all saw it live on TV. If it had happened out in the jungle somewhere, or tucked away in some remote third world country, with no-one to point a camera, we wouldn't have even got a paragraph at the bottom of page 10. And obviously that's why guerrilla terrorists choose high profile targets."


I teach photography, yesterday i took my local newspaper into class, and my students and i had a long debate on the moral implications of the newspapers actions. If anyone else wants to air their views, i thought this might be the place. We are hosted by a huge media corporation after all.

Firstly: Awareness / representation.

The fact that we can see these awful events, brings these events into our homes, our lives, our consciousnesses, and as such the way these images are presented is important. The media may sensationalise images, and cheapen the event. Or it may propagandise the images for a specific aim. Or it may do both just to sells copies, win viewers and pull in dollars.

Secondly: Sensationalism.

A disaster of this scale is impossible to take in in one picture, we are reduced to symbols. Symbols of the destruction, of the human cost, of the lives caught up in the tide of destruction.

What we are watching here is awful. But the old adage is very true, "If 25 people die, it's a tragedy, if 25,000 people die, it's a statistic." My local newspaper has taken pictures of people jumping from the building, blown them up to full page spreads like centrefolds in cheap skin mags. The exploitation of these individuals is completely unreasonable. Because they are just one of thousands, because they are a faceless figure in a crowd, they are fair game? What about the dignity of these individuals, what about the feelings of their families? These are human beings losing their lives, not extras in a bad movie.

Sensationalism does not bring the story home, it abstracts it, exploits the dead, distorts our sense of scale both of the individual tragedies and the disaster as a whole, and leaves us not feeling for the victims and their families, but feeling numb.

Thirdly: Propaganda.

Propaganda is a world more commonly used in war time and in a negative way, but equally it can be a positive rallying thing. I think we've seen both.
The image (almost certainly deliberately orchestrated) of fire fighters raising the Stars and Stripes over the ruins of the building, in the tableau of Rosenthal's famous Iwo Jima picture, was remarkably effective. No matter how hackneyed the original image may have become, this was genuinely stirring. I can only hope that as the original image was one of Americas victory, and the symbol of the end of hostilities, that this event will be seen not as a new Pearl Harbour (fresh in minds thanks to Hollywood) but as a new Hiroshima, one last bloody act, which ends, not escalates a war.

Equally the anti Arab propaganda we have seen on the TV, of "celebrations" in Palestine, awful pictures, but pictures sought out and distorted, as though a nation were rejoicing, rather than the horror which is felt throughout the middle east, and hands out to the ABC anchorman who followed the footage by saying "It's easy to find pictures of a small group of people celebrating at any time, now let's get back to some really news" - i don't know his name, but he's a true journalist, a humanitarian, and deserves a Pulitzer for his utterly apt and compassionate reaction.

Iraq it seems has also had is propaganda machine in action (as usual) playing the cnn footage and playing patriotic anti-US songs. An awful thing to do, but can you imagine the sense of victory for an Iraqi watching his TV, after being bombed, monitored and blockaded for ten years, with the TV marking the US as The Enemy.

And now we have the flood of emotional voyeurism, the minutae of what should be peoples private grief. Phone calls, answering machine messages, crying relatives paraded before the camera in an attempt to share their anger and grief with someone, and being lead in a circus.

Appaualing. This is not news, this is grief. And in the absence of real developments, this is exploitation of that grief.

I agree with much of what you say, but you should be wary of concluding that because you know that the media is distorting events, you know what's actually happening. Unless you've been engaged in a whistle-stop tour of the West Bank, for example, you're just favouring one media image over another.

As for the parade of grieving relatives, I personally don't like they way they're used as the meat in the sandwich of some trite voice-over, but people clearly do want to watch and take part in these things. If victims' relatives feel exploited you can bet there'll be no end of rival media groups anxious to let the rest of the world know about it, so they're likely to tread very carefully.

I've been dealing with the photos of the tragedy all week in my job for an online version of a New York newspaper. It's been heartbreaking. I have to say, we've been carefully discussing what pictures to put up. I didn't want to put up the picture of people jumping from the WTC. It's heartbreaking to see. Even more heartbreaking to realize that the person jumping made a decision to take the quick death of a jump rather than what could be a slow death from the approaching fire. But you know what? That's what really happened that day. Maybe a picture like that can bring people to feel ... and maybe make them think twice about an awful revenge that would cause more pain like the kind those poor souls went through. It certainly brought the horror of the situation home.

It's been so difficult being immersed in it. But if you could see the pictures I've seen ... the ones they don't show because they are so disturbing ... well, they don't always exploit. Perhaps it depends on the media outlet. I don't know.

I also just spent 10 hours putting pictures of victims up on our website. The friends and relatives want these pictures to get wide exposure. They hope someone will recognize them and maybe give them news. They want to know if their loved ones are lying unknown in a hospital somewhere. They want to know where they were during the tragedy. They are pasting these photos and flyers up all over the City in the hope that they can get some news, some sense of closure. Is it manipulation to air their stories? To post their pictures? I can't say. I put in a lot of extra time today to get up all the pictures they moved. I felt that maybe I was doing some good ... maybe the friends and families of these people will get a little comfort seeing their pictures there.

I also think it's important to put faces to these people. They're not just statistics. They're not just names. They're people. Seeing what seemed to be an endless parade of faces looking at me all day made me really, really think about that. Maybe it's not so bad if it makes people realize that.

Yes, i agree, just because you know this CNN footage was faked (the pictures syndicated were shot in 1991, on the invasion of Kuwait) doesn't mean that similar events aren't happening.

Friends in Palestine tell me that the people there are at home, watching the news. While a small minority are proclaiming a moral victory, they run the gauntlet even there, as outraged Palestinians, appalled at the event (and obviously fearful of adverse media representation), are stamping out these 'celebrations' as they happen.

The ethical point here is why was this a story, why go to the lengths of fabricating pictures, what was the agenda behind it? A political one - maybe. More likely a desire to give audiences the images they want and expect. Ratings ratings ratings.


And grieving relatives are indeed the icing on the cake of a lot of these reports, which begs again the question, why represent this private moment as news? We as the consumers have to ask why we buy it? Is it voyeurism, it even prurient possibly?

The sad thing is that the relative will not feel exploited for a long while, but this kind of presentation on tv tends to leave the victims family feeling 'dirty' for want of a better word.

Having watched for as much of Tuesday as I could, and then catching the news regularly ever since, I have noticed many different kinds of reporting by the media, and many kinds of response in myself.

During the live coverage, those reporting what was happenning were as numb and confused and horrified as the rest of us. But the images were of buildings and aeroplanes and smoke and dust. An horrific epic was unfurling before our eyes.

Now I see the photographs of the dead, hear the messages and the phonecalls they send to their loved ones, see the families desparate, and it puts a human context on it. I did not weep on Tuesday, I did weep today.

Horror or titilation? Witness or voyeurism?

The line between public service and exploitation lies with those who receive the communication, not with those who transmit it.

I feel that one of the few things I can do - my duty in fact - is to witness.

But what do I know?

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a horrified witness called Ben
(offering a to Shea)
http://www.bb.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A631261

Which paper? Could you tell us? Please, BBC, let the URL through, as this could be very important to someone else.

I disagree. Contrast what has been done with photos, etc with just a news blurb. People would have no sense of the tragedy - in human terms. I don't think people should bury their collective heads in the sand -- we need to see to feel to really grasp and deal with this. There is much good that has been shown - true human courage. I also think there has been considerable editing out of graphic stuff. The people jumping was really done up on the BBC but only mentioned on most of the US channels.

I am sure you are in denial but you have eloquently disguised it somewhat.

Asterion, I have the URL on my Personal Space.

How to show the human cost of something like this is difficult. I don't know how it is best achieved, but i can't help thinking that full page photo's such as we've seen in the uk is the best way. These people become billboards, not individuals. And relatives speak, often without thinking, upsetting other relatives who feel intruded upon, and often traumatising themselves in the long run. The media knows this and still continues.

There is the problem of over exposure, the desensitising effect of TV in both news and fiction. A child in the US sees 15,000 deaths on TV before it's 10 years old.

But then perhaps if we'd seen images like this from Bagdad every week for the last ten years we'd understand the human cost there we'd have acted against our governments ourselves, perhaps we would have averted this, it's odd.

On a different but still media related tack, i was listening to the radio when the 3 minutes silence began. A very moving experience. I moved through the channels to get a sence of the universality of this tribute.

Radio 1 - the UK pop channel, followed the silence with REM's Everybody Hurts, which was a bit clunky, an bit cliched, but incredibly effective. Other channels had not tried to articulate the moment at all.

The only channel that was different was Classic FM - which observed the silence by playing recordings of birdsong to symbolise silence i suppose, a bit naff though, but then they followed it by fading up into Goreski's 3rd Symphony - the Aschwitz memorial - a comparission which i found to be in terrifically bad taste, and unspeakably crass.

But i concratulate the DJ on radio one for being brave enough to try to articulate the moment, and on doing it so well.

I was sent this by one of my students (having talked extensively about photographic morality recently.


Here's a moral question for you. This is an imaginary situation, but I
think you will find it beneficial to think through this exercise.


The situation: You are in the Middle East, and there is a huge flood in progress. Many homes have been lost, water supplies compromised and
structures destroyed. You're a freelance photographer for a news service, you're travelling alone, looking for particularly poignant scenes that you can shoot.
You come across Osama Bin Laden who has been swept away by the
floodwaters. He is barely hanging on to a tree limb and is about to go under. You have to make a choice. You can either put down your camera and save him, or take a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of him as he loses his grip on the limb.
So, here's the question...and think carefully before you answer it:
















Which lens would you use?