This morning it was hard to ignore the front pages of most of the newspapers. Nearly all of them ran gruesome amateur pictures showing a wounded Muammar Gaddafi just before he died yesterday in another dramatic day in Libya. It was, at the very least, NSFW, yet many commuters still bought them on their way to work and I can imagine many staff rooms across the land also had a copy on their coffee table; just to make eating a lunch of beetroot soup that more enticing.
That still doesn’t answer the question of whether or not they should have even been used. Let’s consider the pros and cons:
Pros: You’re proving that he is dead, which is something that never happened with Osama Bin Laden’s death. You’re not conceding to use a picture of Gaddafi from the archives that makes him look proud and noble. You’re actually reporting the news.
Cons: There’s no way that very young kids should be allowed to see this. It goes beyond the boundaries of taste. Other pictures could have been used to support a newspaper’s angle.
Personally, I think that newspaper editors are in a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation. Whatever they would have chosen to do would have seen a backlash from readers and commentators. That said, some of the sensationalism that’s been applied by some of the tabloids, who’ll remain nameless, has been dubious at the very least. I guess that’s their job though – to provoke a knee-jerk reaction from the reader.
This’ll be forgotten about tomorrow anyway. The focus from here on in is how Libya progress post-Gaddafi.
