Haiti and front-page ethics

I've been meaning to post this for most of the past week, but I suppose it's better late than never.

A newspaper design blog I follow posted a number of newspaper front pages from Friday (a few days after the Haiti earthquake). The focus was on what photos of bodies were used and how they were played — and the ethics of the decisions to use them in that way.

On the same day, a Missouri School of Journalism listserv I'm on delved into a similar discussion as to whether the New York Times should have run the photo it did. (You can see the page and photo the discussion was about in the link above.)

These types of discussions about whether to use photos of bloody or dead bodies are common among journalists, and most (if not all) papers have them when deciding which photos to publish during tragedies such as the recent earthquake. In simple terms, it's balancing the paper's responsibility to show the extent of the situation and not sugarcoat it with the readers' (and paper's) desire to not see overly sensational, bloody and disturbing images. In other words, does the photo tell the story perfectly, or is the paper only using the photo in hopes of getting a shocking reaction?

To see front pages of newspapers from across the country and the world any day, visit Newseum.org's Front Page Gallery.