12 Taste and Offensiveness

We’ll turn to live television news for our opening hypothetical.

Study the following presentation slides by using the forward button or clicking on sections of the control bar.

This opening hypothetical is not far-fetched. Live, on-the-scene reporting can occasionally lead to unplanned content that is tasteless or, worse, graphically offensive to an audience.

For example, a situation similar to the opening hypothetical occurred on Jan. 11, 1986, when a man shot himself during a live news broadcast on KXAS-TV in Fort Worth, Texas.

The YouTube channel for TV Museum and Archive has extensive file footage from that broadcast. Do not watch the video unless you are fully prepared for the graphic content.

• Gunman suicide on live TV after hostage situation – TV Museum and Archive (YouTube video)

In another case from 2012, Fox News aired a suicide to a nationwide audience. A five-second time delay was supposed to prevent graphic content such as a live suicide from being broadcast. A Fox News executive blamed a “severe human error” for Fox’s mistake.

• Fox News’ Smith apologizes after man commits suicide on air – NPR

Although taste and offensiveness can extend to sexual content and profanity, this chapter primarily focuses on video and images that show suffering or death.

This chapter relies primarily on text with links to external content instead of embedded videos and images. You will read about several case studies, and the links give you control, essentially a trigger warning, over whether you want to view graphic content. Toward the end of the chapter, we will briefly consider the pros and cons of trigger warnings.

BEYOND LIVE TELEVISION

Beyond the opening presentation and examples, it’s not just live television broadcasts that lead to errors in judgment related to taste and offensiveness. In 2019, a store clerk in Wellston, Missouri, went live with video on Facebook to show a dying police officer, Michael Langsdorf, on the floor at the store where the clerk worked. The officer had been shot while responding to a call about a bad check.

If this case study only involved the clerk’s Facebook video, we likely wouldn’t be studying it in this chapter. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, however, shared a link to the Facebook video but later deleted the link and offered an apology to readers. The newspaper’s apology acknowledged that “posting the link was bad news judgment.”

Read a summary news report of this case.

• Facebook Live Video Showing Officer Dying Sparks Outcry – Heavy

You can also read the the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s apology.

• From the Editor’s Desk: An apology to our readers– St. Louis Post-Dispatch

POLICE VIDEOS

Police footage can also lead to difficult questions about airing graphic video. The ethical principles of truth and transparency may lead journalists to share scenes of shootings that involve police. Footage from police body cameras can sometimes verify or refute initial police reports. But some viewers recoil from videos that show extreme violence or death

The following 2021 summary from the Associated Press analyzes how news outlets handled police body-camera footage of events leading to the death of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago.

• Chicago video tests newsroom handling of graphic footage – Associated Press

A similar debate surfaced early in 2023 when Memphis police released video of officers beating a 29-year-old Black man after a traffic stop. CNN Business provided an overview of the decision-making process for producers and editors.

• How media outlets are handling the Tyre Nichols arrest footage – CNN

The article includes the following observation:

Typically, news organizations are cautious about running such footage and only do so when it is extremely newsworthy. In such cases, often a decision is made to run the graphic footage in an uncensored manner for a limited time, before later airing more limited clips of the incident.

PHOTOS OF WAR, SUFFERING AND MASS SHOOTINGS

A graphic photo, even if it’s not welcomed by the audience, can provide an honest, impactful rendering of the realities of war or human suffering. For example, a detailed photo of a mass grave in a war-torn country can be more powerful than a text-only story. However, some viewers will consider the photo offensive.

As another example, in the mid-1990s, the U.S. military was involved in a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Somalia. During that time, journalists took photos of dead and wounded U.S. soldiers, including images of a dead soldier being dragged through the street in the city of Mogadishu.

Here is a compilation of photos from the incident along with explanatory text.

• U.S soldier dragged through Mogadishu – Iconic Photos

In the linked text, you will read the views of a Canadian photographer, who observed that at some news outlets a “decision was made to censor something sexually offensive, while the outrageous violence of desecrating a corpse is deemed safe for the general public’s consumption.”

In a more recent example, the Washington Post published graphic photos and video from mass shootings as part of a project that reported on devastation caused by AR-15 shootings, including the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

The Post’s content began with a trigger warning that “photos, videos and personal accounts below are extremely disturbing and may be too upsetting for some people.” In an explanation to readers about why they chose to publish the photos, editors wrote the following;

In the end, we decided that there is public value in illuminating the profound and repeated devastation left by tragedies that are often covered as isolated news events but rarely considered as part of a broader pattern of violence.

The photos included several bloody scenes, including classrooms, but no identifiable bodies. The editors noted that some families in Uvalde were willing to grant permission for the Post to publish photos of dead bodies, but editors ultimately decided that “the potential harm to victims’ families outweighed any potential journalistic value of showing recognizable bodies.”

Following is a link to the graphic content published by the Post along with an in-depth analysis of ethical considerations written by Harvard’s Nieman Lab.

• A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings – The Washington Post
• The Washington Post takes the “unusual step” of publishing graphic photos from mass shootings – Harvard’s Nieman Lab

WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST?

Some journalists use the Wheaties test as a decision-making guide. According to the Wheaties test, journalists should ask themselves whether typical consumers will be offended by explicit or visually startling media content while they are eating breakfast.

Other journalists may use a golden-mean approach to balance conflicting ethical goals:

• publishing truthful but graphic content
  vs.
• minimizing harm to those with a personal connection to the content (such as family members of a dead soldier who appears in photos of a war scene)

TRIGGER WARNINGS

One advantage of online media is that trigger warnings are easier to insert as a first line of defense before viewers can see graphic images and video or read profanity. As noted in the AP story about Adam Toledo’s death, “News organizations in virtually all cases warned people that what they were about to see could be considered graphic or disturbing.”

On the other hand, not all journalists approve of trigger warnings. In a linked New York Times essay that you studied in our previous chapter, award-winning photographer David Hume Kennerly criticized trigger warnings and suggested that “the best photographs of war might make us want to look away. It’s imperative that we do not.”

Similarly, in the following NPR interview from May 2022, trauma surgeon Amy Goldberg said Americans have become desensitized to gun violence, and the best way to reduce partisanship is for audiences to see graphic photos of victims.

• Citizens need to see the destruction military-style weapons wreak, surgeon says – NPR

And for those who are interested in a deeper dive beyond the goals of this chapter, the Journalist’s Resource offers experts’ extensive viewpoints about publishing graphic images from mass shootings.

• Should news outlets show graphic images of mass shooting victims? Researchers and other experts weigh in. – The Journalist’s Resource

A NOTE ABOUT PROFANITY

Although still images and video are our main focus in this chapter, media professionals should also avoid publishing or broadcasting unnecessary profanity. The Federal Communications Commission defines profanity as “language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance.” As a key part of the decision-making process for profanity, media professionals should consider 1) what their audience will consider appropriate; and 2) how much value or clarity including the profanity provides for readers.

For example, in 2018 multiple news outlets reported that President Donald Trump had referred to several nations as “shithole countries.” NBC included the word “shithole” in the story’s headline. Although the word “shithole” may have offended a few readers as they were eating their Wheaties, many editors decided that including the profanity gave readers more precision and clarity.

NOT THAT KIND OF HOE

Let’s close the chapter with some subtle humor.

You’ve probably read about how social media platforms attempt to monitor user content to prevent disinformation and remove offensive content. The monitoring process usually involves algorithms instead of human editors, though, which can lead to annoying mistakes that make well-intended users feel powerless. Here’s a 2021 example of a gardening group that was mistakenly flagged for violating Facebook usage policies:

• Hoe no! Facebook snafu spells trouble for gardening group – The Associated Press

Unfortunately, this case also exemplifies the problems with computer identification of offensive content on social media.

CLOSING REVIEW