If you live in Toronto, the big news event of the day yesterday (and I'm sure this made several national newscasts), was the police shooting of an armed hostage taker.
My colleague Peter Murphy reported on this event for CTV National News. At that link, you can also find lots of video broadcast by our Toronto affiliate, CFTO. (If that link doesn't work, head here and look at the right hand side of the screen for all the video links)
Our cameras and cameras from other outlets in Toronto were on the scene at Toronto's Union Station well before a police sniper fired the shot that blew apart the hostage taker's head. A TV news crew from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in town for another feature, was looking down on the drama from their rooms in the Royal York Hotel across the street from Union. So this event was filmed from several angles by several crews many of which caught, in a very graphic medium close-up, the sniper's bullet entering and exiting the man's head.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of commuters and those in the surrounding office towers saw the event and the killing.
And yet, no broadcaster or print outlet I know of broadcast or published a photo which showed the actual moment of the man's death. If you watch the video of our piece (there's a link to the video above), you see the man and his hostage and then, just as you hear the sound of the rifle, the frame is frozen. The next image you see is a long-shot of the man lying on the pavement with police officers converging on his now lifeless body.
Having seen the unedited footage collected by our crews at the scene, I think this was the right way to treat this.
But some bloggers at a recent Toronto conference on Participatory Journalism, who believe Big Media has too much power, say things like this should be shown on TV, that we are censoring by omission. At this conference, we were talking about the video from Iraq that showed the beheading of the American hostage. That video ended up, in all its gory detail, on the Internet.
So far as I know, the gory details from yesterday's incident in Toronto have not been shown anywhere. (Please correct me if I'm wrong)
Is that the right call? I think it is.
It is the right call. As an advocate of participatory journalism, I don't believe that showing gratuitous gore equals a more enlightened approach.
Thanks, J.D. While media groupthink sometimes takes newspapers and TV in the wrong direction, journalists make a whole lot of good decisions, too.
We seem to go over this every single time there is an incident of the sort. However, I do agree that not showing it was wise… now if we could figure out why we feel more pity for a dog killed in a movie than an innocent bystander eating a bullet on the 6 o'clock news… we would be set!
I also agree with not showing it, out of respect to the family. However, it has been posted to the web at Ogrish, which is where most of this stuff ends up.
What bothers me more than this question is how media outlets have pried into the recesses of Mrs. Brookes' life to bring us private details of no relevance to the telling of this story. For example, we now know that she makes $350 a week at her job as a drycleaner. How is her salary relevant? Is it really necessary for the media to be so invasive? Do you have any guidelines on this? It seems not the case, as I've remarked on this as a common practice.
I'm not the reporter on this story although many friends and colleagues are. So let me make the general case for why these details are important.
The first thing we all want to know is: Who are these people? What was he like? What was she like?
Typically, we'll canvas the neighborhood where they lived. After that, we'll go to the municipal tax assessment rolls. How much was their house worth. In this particular case, my colleagues learned early on about the divorce proceeding. The claims by husband and wife in divorce court are open court records, so reporters looked at those. (That's where the information about her weekly salary and his weekly salary, as well, would have come from).
All of this information, I argue, humanizes the individuals who are part of this drama. They are no longer the stereotypes “Estranged Wife” and “Hostage Taker” but Mr. and Mrs. Brookes, who together raised some children, made ends meet on a tight budget; lived in a modest suburban house; and seemed to have had many, many problems which they concealed from their neighbors. Sounds like a lot of us, don't you think?
One other point — It is, indeed, common practice to report this particular detail, when we have the chance. The trick is to report it in as neutral a tone as possible. You may recall that reporters published former General Electric chairman Jack Welch's weekly salary and weekly expenses when he was going through a divorce. I don't think I heard a peep then when it was reported that his weekly salary was something around a million dollars. We report the salaries of public officials frequently. And, in this case, we reported the weekly salary of Mrs. Brookes.
you can see the video of the hostage taker shooting at http://www.ogrish.com/index.php?class=submission&action=view&id=16855