Graphic Images in Journalism

Jeremy Lin
JL402214@ohio.edu

                               Image via  CBS News

We all live in a society where a lot of things go unseen in the media world and a lot of times we do crave some closure to story by viewing an image that would be considered graphic to the normal eye. But where does displaying these images cross the line? Are journalists ignoring important images that the public should see?

Often time’s journalists are faced with the dilemma of deciding whether an image is important to the story at hand or is it just too much for the public to be viewing in their stories. A thing to consider from a journalist perspective, will it be detrimental to the publication that the journalist is writing for? If a regular reader or viewer sees an image or video that would be considered disturbing for their taste it is likely that the journalist and publication as a whole will receive negative feedback which can be ultimately detrimental to both parties.

From the audience perspective, the public eye may feel as though journalist are often ignoring important image that should be exposed and should not be hidden from the public eye. Building more off of that, One of the ethics according to  Society of Professional Journalists is "seek the truth and report it" an important aspect for journalists to consider. As part of journalist’s job is to report the truth and include the proper context to the story so that the reader or viewer is receiving all aspect of the story and not swaying them towards a different direction they should be.

On the publication UK daily express in 2014 a journalist had reported a story on the bombings in Gaza, included in this story was a very graphic image of child that was a victim of the bombing and was seen as too graphic for the public and the publication had received a lot of negative backlash from the release of the image. Media shift had used this story as an example of graphic images in journalism.

While Journalist are supposed to report the whole truth and provide all the context possible to the story the use of graphic image always will receive some sort of negative feedback because not everyone wants to that with a warning or not.