Essay of the week: The rights and wrongs of photo journalism

Looking back, this was the first time in my life that the reality of war had sunk in. The disgusting, dirty, unthinkable results of war. It was very different from the stories of plucky 1940s Glasgow and the pictures of my smiling grandfather in his RAF uniform that I’d grown up with.

When the picture was taken in 1991, the Iraqi army was on the retreat. Jareke’s picture was hugely controversial and only The Observer and the French newspaper Liberation took the decision to print. Jareke was an American, but no publication in his home country would touch the image.

The Observer’s decision did not go down well with many in the UK at the time, not least the readers who complained that using such a picture ruined what should have been a moment of victory and elation for the UK and the US. The image also ruined something else, of course: the US-created myth that this was somehow a cleaner, tidier type of war. This was the first conflict to be shown live on 24-hour news and both the US government and the media wanted it to look like a video game, complete with pounding soundtrack. They talked of “smart bombs” and “surgical strikes” and the reports showed palm trees and beautiful sunsets. The burned bodies of Iraqi soldiers didn’t fit in to this narrative.

The reaction to the photograph is both fascinating and disturbing. The public and the press were happy for their government to play down the realities of war; they actively wanted it to be sanitised.

I couldn’t stop thinking of that picture last weekend as this newspaper faced a barrage of criticism over its front page. Following the terrorist atrocities in Paris, the Sunday Herald chose to use a graphic and visceral image of the aftermath of the shootings at one of the bars in the 10th arrondissement.

There was much support from readers, too though, aware that the reality of war must be shown if journalism is to mean anything. However, many also took to social media to voice their outrage, accusing the paper of terrible things, including disrespecting the dead and choosing this picture just to sell more papers. I couldn’t disagree more, but in the age of the echo chamber of social media, I feel I have to explain how and why decisions like this are made in newsrooms.

Let’s be clear – this image is extremely difficult to look at. Although no victims' faces are shown, dead bodies lie strewn on the ground outside La Belle Equipe bar in a pool of blood. The emergency services are on the scene, working to save others. Two bystanders stand in confused desperation, unable to take in what has happened. You can’t help but imagine the scene in the hours before the picture was taken. The people would have been full of life, enjoying a Friday night out in one of the world’s great cities. And you can’t help but think of the trail of grief that each of the dead will leave, wounds that may never be healed.

The question the picture poses reflects the confusion on the face of the bystander: how could one human being do this to another? Let’s think about this. There is only one reason to put this picture on the front of a newspaper, and that is to reflect the reality of terrorism. The violent, wicked, bloody reality of the death cult that perpetrated this massacre. The mindset of the murderers and their belief that life on this earth is cheap.

The decision to use this picture wasn’t taken lightly. The Sunday Herald editors, like journalists at newspapers around the world, thought long and hard about whether the decision was morally and editorially justifiable. Contrary to what many on social media seem to choose to believe, most journalists are not desensitised, cynical, money-grabbing robots who have become numb to the pain of others. They too shed tears. Many staff in this newspaper have witnessed the horror of war and terrorism first hand. But at the same time they are charged with the job of explaining the inexplicable on a multitude of different levels.

If we choose to sanitise or look away from pictures like this we cannot understand the reality of what we face. Of what may lie ahead and how we could and should respond to such brutality. Of how we, as citizens, can hope to hold our governments to account when we consider their response.

For more than 100 years, photographs have played a key role in our understanding of conflict, and despite the massive advances in technology, I ironically find it heartening that images still have the power to shock us out of our complacency. That must never be lost. So many iconic pictures have cut through propaganda over the years and brought the reality of war crashing uncomfortably into our consciousness.

I am thinking, of course, of Huynh Cong Ut’s defining Vietnam war image of children running down the road screaming after a napalm attack, and Eddie Adams’s picture from the same conflict of a Vietcong soldier shutting his eyes a second before he is shot in the head at close range by a south Vietnamese general.

I’m thinking too of the 1988 picture of Father Alec Reid administering the last rites to British Army Corporal David Howes, who had just been beaten by a mob and shot after he and a colleague drove their car into the funeral procession of an IRA member in Andersonstown, Belfast. Both soldiers were lynched before the eyes of the world.

And then there’s Kevin Carter’s devastating picture from 1993 of the starving Sudanese toddler crouching down on the ground as a vulture watches and waits in the background. Carter, a South African who had worked in war zones all over the world, killed himself a year after the picture was taken, at the age of 33.

It is impossible, of course, to know if any of these pictures made any discernible impact on the outcome of the conflicts they depicted. But what they certainly did change was public perception. After seeing these photographs many ordinary citizens pushed their political leaders to do more to end the wars. In the case of Sudan, many thousands were moved to raise money to feed the starving. Who are we to say that either of these responses wasn’t worthwhile?

More than anything else these pictures brought suffering into a sharp, human focus. Their refusal to make the horror more palatable caused us pain and made us think. And that’s exactly as it should be. It is not for serious news organisations in democratic countries to sanitise the reality of war, conflict, terrorism, whatever you may wish to call it, either at the behest of governments or indeed the reading public. Journalists and photographers can only tell the story of what they see to the best of their ability. The rest is up to others.

“We refuse to show the world as it is,” former BBC journalist Martin Bell, who spent much of his career reporting from war zones, said in 2001. “We not only sanitise it but I think to some extent we glorify it because it is not shown in its true horror and therefore people take it as an acceptable way of settling differences. That’s not just a matter of good and bad taste, that’s a matter of right and wrong.”

It’s hard to disagree with these words. If we look away from the victims, from the reality of their deaths, we do them a grave disservice. And, in turn, we give more power to the perpetrators of terror – we allow them to take the power away from us.

So where does all this leave us in today’s media landscape, where social media allows us, entreats us, to share pictures and stories and opine about them at will? I have mixed feelings. Like most in my profession I relish the opportunity to hear about breaking stories in real time, to access more news and citizen sources than I could ever have dreamed imaginable, to comment directly on issues in a shared community.

But I’m also becoming increasingly concerned about the way social media is used to share and promote a fundamental misunderstanding of what journalism is for and what journalists do. Let us return for a moment to the front page of last weekend’s Sunday Herald. It wasn’t just the picture that caused a stir, the words also sent Twitter into a frenzy of righteous anger.

“France at war”, was the offending headline - an entirely accurate and succinct reflection of the French President’s words in the wake of the murders. Editorially, these words represented a powerful match with the picture. Most crucially of all, this headline told the story of the night and gave an early indication of how things would develop. France is indeed at war. Some may not like that, - this paper may not like that - but it is true. And facts must be cherished if journalism is to mean anything.

Out in the Twittersphere, however, for some (including some of the paper’s own readers), it instantly repositioned the Sunday Herald from a thoughtful, trustworthy, left-of-centre source of news to a war-mongering rag. Retweet after retweet interpreted “France at war” as the paper’s view rather than that of Francois Hollande. Since when did headlines on news stories represent the position of the newspaper? Since when did people not know or take the time to distinguish between news and comment? And since when did they jump to judge without stopping for a minute to consider, or to even read an accompanying story?

I can’t help but think the answer to this is related to the fact that we are allowing ourselves to be pushed by social media into political silos that blunt our critical faculties.

We’ve never questioned and scrutinised our media sources so closely, and that’s a good thing. We’ve woken up to the complex relationships between big corporations, governments and the media. But that doesn’t mean that every news story is spun, that every journalist is bought, that all in the media are part of some big conspiracy that only social media can “call out”.

It’s great that everybody, in theory, has a voice on social media. But it’s not great that so many want to use it in such an unthinking way. The vapidity of much of the comment on social media seems to go hand in hand with the need to jump to conclusions and jump on bandwagons in a way many of us would never allow ourselves to do in real life.

It also leads to echo chambers, and I sense a moment of real danger here as folk spend their time inside these silos on Twitter and Facebook, hearing and repeating views they already agree with. When they switch on the TV or open a newspaper and don’t automatically see their own view or feelings reflected, they feel upset and frustrated. And this in turn leads to further polarisation – if you’re not with me, you’re against me. Your views are “offensive”. I’m going to mute you and follow more people that think the same as me.

I worry that such isolated positioning of our online personas will eventually kill our ability to think critically and work through complex questions. It will destroy nuance and leave us unable to question our own viewpoints. And surely in this time of war and terror, truth and lies, constant streams of information and misinformation, we have never been more in need of these critical faculties, of these nuances, of that ability to challenge our own positions and, if necessary, if the point has been argued well, change our minds on things.

Journalism helps us to do that. It reports the facts at any given time and seeks to explain the significance of events. It brings us eyewitness accounts and expert analysis. It offers comment and opinion for people to agree and disagree with as they see fit. And most of the time, it offers all this in good faith.

Journalists don’t always get it right. Indeed, as we saw in the handling of events such as the Hillsborough disaster and the murder of Milly Dowler, they can act despicably, unforgivably, and make already awful situations worse.

Last week’s Sunday Herald front page did not get it wrong. On the contrary, it displayed thoughtful journalism aimed at hammering home the reality of terrorism, and of the world we live in. And that’s all any newspaper can hope to do.

Journalists are not paid to make you feel better - to not offend you. And we are not paid to tell you what to think. We are not your keeper, nor your nanny. We can only offer you up what we know, or what we believe, to the best of our ability. The rest is up to you.