Compass Photo Response

While looking at these pictures, I could not separate my journalistic mind from my emotions. I’m sure for everyone in the class, bits of disgust, bits of sadness and bits of confusion definitely came to mind. In answering the questions, I resulted back to the 10 questions about ethical reporting Prof. Follis referenced during lecture. Would I run these photos? I don’t feel that all the photos can be lumped into the same category. If I were an editor, I would be comfortable publishing the first photo of the boy and his dead dog, the 15-year-old who fell on the fence and the final picture of the girl at Mardi Gras. The remaining three, however, would not run in my paper for the simple fact that if the roles of the people in the pictures were reversed with my family, I would be devastated seeing that in print. What criteria did I use? Again, I reread the 10 questions about ethical reporting from lecture. For starters, I would need more of a context as to when, why and where these pictures were taken. As I said before, the main issue I struggled with was thinking about whether the roles were reversed between the people in the picture and the if the people were my family—would I be able to handle not just seeing it in general, but seeing it in a newspaper? Under no circumstances would I personally run the pictures that showed actual deceased human beings. It’s debatable whether it is right or wrong to run all the pictures, I just would not be comfortable showing dead bodies in my newspaper. Would my decision be different if the events were local? No, my decision would remain the same. I think it would be more devastating to the families if the pictures did just run locally. Then all of their extended family and friends would not be able to escape the haunting nature these photos would leave. Does where or how I play the photo have any bearing on my decision? Again, no, my decision would be final. I am a very decisive person, and I like to think I’m a moral person as well, and I would have too much of an issue with morality knowing that I gave the permission to run the remaining photos in my paper. With which photo did I struggle the most? The picture I had the most trouble deciding on if I would run it was Bud Dwyer as he was killing himself. I grappled with this the most because Dwyer was not technically dead when the photo was taken. I know it sounds horrible, but Dwyer was choosing to kill himself where the others were either murdered or died on accident.