Faces of Death

Yesterday Col. Moammar Gadhafi was killed and the world was rid of yet another mass-murdering tyrant.  A victim of the Arab Spring, much like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian President Ben Ali before him, Gadhafi was ousted by his own people following weeks of protest against his regime.  Driven into hiding in his last remaining stronghold of Sirte, the former Libyan dictator was allegedly surrounded by rebel forces and died after sustaining wounds from a major gun fight. 

Quickly following news reports of Gadhafi’s death, media outlets around the world began showing images taken on a cell phone of what appeared to be a bloodied Colonel Gadhafi severely wounded or already dead.   A few hours later as more confirmations of his death were reported from sources within Libya, a video was obtained by the Arab network Al Arabiya and reproduced by Western news outlets showing Gadhafi’s body being paraded through the streets by rebel forces. 

The coverage of Gadhafi’s death raises an important ethical question for journalists and editors: When is it appropriate to show images or video of a dead public figure?

These are questions that journalists have had to confront frequently in recent years given the spread of technology that allows nearly anyone to share photos or videos of breaking news with people across the globe in seconds.  There doesn’t appear to be a distinct answer or a set of clear standards for when or if this is appropriate. 

For example, in 2006 when ex-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was hanged for committing crimes against humanity, a graphic cell phone video of the hanging went viral online.  Nevertheless, almost all Western media refrained from showing the footage.  What is the difference between Hussein’s execution and Gadhafi’s?  Gadhafi’s death was certainly more violent.  Furthermore, when Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, were killed, the U.S. government released the gory photos of their corpses and many media outlets reprinted them.  Where is the consistency?

Media outlets need to adopt a uniform policy for airing or publishing images of deceased public figures, particularly war criminals or “most-wanted” individuals.  The policy should, in my opinion, be full disclosure.  I think the media was justified in airing the images of Gadhafi’s dead body because these images lend to the credibility of reporting.  Many of the reports coming from this part of the world are inconsistent and of questionable accuracy.  Videos and images help us to verify or refute suspicious reports.  Such coverage could have helped to dispel speculation across much of the Middle East that the U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden was a hoax, had the U.S. government chosen to release the pictures of bin Laden’s corpse.

Furthermore, with bloggers, YouTube, and Twitter, these types of graphic images become widely accessible to media consumers regardless of what news sources show.  In the past, when major television networks and newspapers were the sole sources for visual information, the goal of shielding the public from graphic images could be well served by keeping this material unpublished.  Today it is much harder to make the argument that images of dead terrorists or dictators should be kept out of the news media because they might be too gruesome for public consumption.  If these images are already available and are newsworthy, one could say that media outlets have a responsibility to reproduce the content, so that viewers know the information is coming from a credible source and what they are seeing can be explained to them.