Does Gun Violence Demand More Graphic Images In The News?

Part of the recurring debate over America’s gun violence addresses questions over news media coverage. These questions become more urgent when children are victims, such as in the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

What kind of coverage is appropriate?

Should journalists ever show bodies and blood?

Would such graphic coverage galvanize public opinion into policy, or would it numb us even more to the parade of gun violence?

Some have begun calling for more dramatic action by journalists to depict the results of the violence–even perhaps the victims' bodies.

Jeh Johnson, the former homeland security secretary, recently wrote that “something graphic is required to awaken the public to the real horror of these repeated tragedies,” calling for something like “an Emmitt Till moment” when the country was shocked after the mother of the slain 14-year-old insisted his battered body be shown by the media in 1955, which further motivated the burgeoning Civil Rights movement (Johnson, 2022).

Similarly, New York University professor Susie Linfield argued that “a serious case can be made–indeed, I agree with it–that the nation should see exactly how an assault rifle pulverizes the body of a 10-year-old, just as we need to see (but rarely did) the injuries to our troops in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars” (Linfield, 2022).

Source: Julia Taubitz/Unsplash

Despite such calls, there is good reason to doubt that resorting to such graphic depictions would produce the results that Johnson and Linfield envision. It would never be so simple as they suggest. And our digital culture poses too many opportunities for bad actors to abuse and manipulate any such images in ways that all of us might well regret.

The use of photos to depict the bloody aftermath of shooting violence raises a wide array of ethical questions, not the least of which involve journalistic roles, privacy, equal treatment, dignity, and objectification