Pictures Say a Thousand Words and We Need Them

Thomas Garverick
cg701315@ohio.edu

Censorship is a fundamental key in journalism. What you can say or what you can report on is important to remember. But what about what you can show the public?

This is a very interesting topic, given the fact that we just got done talking about the shooting in Pittsburgh and whether or not we should report on funerals or not. But now this topic runs into the visual aspect of the story like that.

From an article I read on Nienmanreports.org, I found this quote to be extremely eye-opening. 

"We must force ourselves to look," editor in chief of bild.de said. "Without pictures the world would be more ignorant, the needy even more invisible, more lost... Photographs are the screams of the world."

I mean, she's 100 percent correct. We as journalists have an obligation to the people that we need to paint the picture for the public, even if it's ugly. Take this picture for example:

A beach explosion in Gaza apart of the Israel-Gaza War. Photo credit: Times.

What if Times never ran this picture? If you're the editor in chief and you see this and refuse to post it, why are you withholding that from the public?

They ran this picture because the people have the right to see what is going in the world. We don't live in a perfect world and awful things like this happen. We can't live in a world where we are ignorant to things like this happening, it's not right. 

It's our job to report the truth -- regardless if it's good or bad, we have to do our job. That picture was released back in 2014 when they Israel War and ongoing conflict in Syria were going on. That's something that we can not ignore. 

However, it was interesting to read why some journalists might not be willing to post pictures because they don't want to be the one to "scar other humans." In a survey done from Times, here's a result that they graphic pictures could harm us the professionals, let alone the general public.

"Frequent, repetitive viewing of violent news-related video and other media raises news professionals' vulnerability to a range of  psychological injury, including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder."

It's a topic that will probably be debated our entire lives. It's crazy to think that people build studies to show it effects us journalists just as much as it would harm the average person. 

This may just be me, but if there's something going in this world that's not legally or ethically right, I want to know about it whether through that's words or having to see a visual image to have it make an impact on me, I want that feeling. Everyone should too.