We published a powerful photograph on our front page on Monday.
Recovery crews were pulling the victim of a plane crash from the Mohawk River. The victim’s arm was visible above the water.
More than words could do, the image captured by Gazette photographer Peter Barber conveyed a profoundly sorrowful event at a moment in time.
We received a few calls about the picture from people who were saddened or shocked by it.
We do not routinely publish such photographs without considerable thought. The editors who were on duty Sunday night discussed whether the photo was too shocking or too distasteful to be published in The Daily Gazette. Their decision was that it was not too graphic and that it brought home dramatically the terrible accident that had claimed the lives of three people when their small plane crashed into the river only moments after takeoff from a small airstrip in Glenville. It was also judged to be the best photo of several available to us.
In the news business, there is a term called “afghanistanism” that comes up occasionally. It refers to a rather cynical philosophy that holds that newspapers should be more considerate when covering disasters at home than they are of, say, a train wreck in India. The idea is that local readers are less concerned about disasters that involve victims thousands of miles away than they are about those that affect their friends and relatives.
It’s antiquated thinking and wrongheaded, which is to say that people might feel that way subconsciously but they shouldn’t. Loss of human life is a tragedy no matter where it occurs, no matter how abstract it is. The issue with a photo like that of the plane crash victim is that it’s all too real and likely to evoke strong emotions.
We try to exercise the same kind of standards in dealing with stories and photos with strong content whether they’re from Schenectady or Beijing. And sometimes, by not showing a powerful image after a terrible tragedy like Sunday’s, we’re not giving our readers the full weight of the story. We’re sanitizing a tragedy to make it more palatable to our audience. That’s wrong. A plane crash and the loss of three lives is supposed to evoke strong emotions.
We’ll always make judgments about whether an image is too graphic, too shocking or in bad taste. Some might view that as sanitizing the news as well.
But, there’s a difference between spiking a photo in which someone’s making an obscene gesture or exposing himself and choosing not to publish a powerful image from the scene of a tragedy because it might be offensive to someone’s sensibilities.
Reader feedback is always welcome. Feel free to post below.
Irv Dean is city editor of The Daily Gazette
