Slashdot Mirror

you're making sense, and after seeing some of the gruesome pictures from Basra and other places, I can sympathize with your aversion to gore. However, you talk about representing the consequences of an action, and you must realize that mangled bodies are the primary and intended consequence of using the weapons which Anglo-American news outlets are only too ready to show being fired. It also represents a kind of objectivity, the kind you get from having multiple perspectives, since its very hard to interpret the thoughts of an emotionally distressed person, but if you see, for instance, somebody carrying a mangled child away from a bomb blast, you have the immediate context of their suffering before your eyes.

You would want to see this guy's blog for an intelligent discussion of these issues.

He notes how the beeb cropped this photo to cut out the child's mangled foot. Also notice how you don't see all the other dead bodies in the bbc picture.

My feeling is the beeb is generally far more tasteful than what I've seen of Al-Jazeera, and that's comforting. But I suspect I don't need to feel so comfortable about my country invading other countries.

As to the arguments about footage of bloody car accidents and the like, you know that's a red herring because cars are designed to transport people, thus car accidents are an unintended consequence of driving cars, and it is not analogous to war carnage where the only accident is hitting the wrong target, not the death and destruction. Awful footage of car wrecks would be newsworthy if, hypothetically, a carmaker had knowledge that a car's design would result in certain types of horrific accidents, but failed to take steps to protect its customers or the general public. Or when any public safety concerns are at issue, such as bad intersections, train crossings, what have you. If you ask for a blanket ban on gore on the grounds that it elicits a strong emotional response, you are cutting off a vital aspect of public debate, and you make it difficult for the public to act on the basis of informed opinions. That's a recipe for bad journalism, deeply irresponsible.