I’m curious to know what Megalomedia readers think of this photo from the front page of today’s La Presse:
To see it in its original placement/context, go here.
If you can’t discern what’s happening, a man appears to be stumbling as he carries a child with a large piece of shrapnel in his head. It’s a fairly disturbing image, especially in hard copy.
Notwithstanding the politics of the situation, how does everyone feel about running such a graphic photo? I can’t imagine ever seeing anything like this in an English paper but even my boss, who reads La Presse daily, says he’s never seen anything quite this intense before.
I agree that this is a disturbing image and that it is hard to imagine mainstream English papers running anything like this, but this disturbing picture is depicting a disturbing reality. The mainstream press has a responsibility to reflect the realities of these situations, a mandate in which they fail miserably. Choosing instead to publish only photos taken at a distance that display a single corpse lying against a building or something of that nature represents a different approach to covering suffering the Middle East, or anywhere else. Simply because the latter is the only coverage Canadians are used to does not mean it should be the only coverage that is ‘appropriate’ or allowed in Canada. Ignoring or downplaying in the press the suffering of anyone is a disservice to the public that the press is supposed to serve. Looking back at past coverage and photos of wars, conflicts, killing and suffering it is the graphic photos displaying reality that are remembered. A good example is Vietnam, you ask almost anyone what image comes to mind they will probably say the Eddie Adams picture of a street execution (http://www.yale.edu/yale300/democracy/may1text/images/Vietnamshooting.jpg) or the Pulitzer prize photograph by Nick Ut of the young girl, Kim Phuc, running from her village naked after a napalm attack
(http://perso.orange.fr/strige/Nick%20Ut%20Vietnam%20non%20recadr%e9e.jpg). Show the public the truth and it will be both meaningful and remembered anything else will be remembered as deception or simply be forgotten.