Dominic Lawson: The case for offending the public

From Minami Sanriku come reports of row upon row of blue body bags. Yet this is deemed too offensive to show

How much can you bear to see? How much should we show you? Depending on whether you are a consumer or a producer of news, these are the hardest questions facing the media at a time of conflict and catastrophe. Now we have both categories: the first in Libya and the second in Japan.

In Libya we are being told of "massacres" and reporters speak of the appalling injuries being inflicted on the ill-equipped rebels by Colonel Gadaffi's tanks, artillery and air force. Yet, from all that we have been allowed to see on the television or on the pages of our newspapers, this could simply be hyperbole. Presumably the decision not to display the visual proof of such claims has been made on grounds of taste and decency. Our children look at television news and papers (or so we must hope) and they must not be given nightmares by the sight of bodies blown apart by the outstanding weaponry we have sold to the Libyan government.

Meanwhile, from the obliterated town of Minami Sanriku in Japan, where up to 10,000 people have been declared "missing", the chief correspondent of Channel 4 News, Alex Thomson, reports seeing row upon row of bright blue polythene body bags, and of buzzards circling overhead. Yet his organisation will not show the images which Thomson graphically described. Presumably, this also is deemed too offensive. As the deputy editor of The Independent's picture desk put it to me: "Somebody, somewhere will be offended by certain types of imagery and it is probably a much easier decision not to run an image of a dead body than it is to take a risk and go with that picture."

As an ex-editor, I know that feeling. There are times, however, when the use of an undeniably shocking image is eminently justifiable by basic journalistic principles. In January 2001 I took the decision to publish on the front page of The Sunday Telegraph a photograph of seven shroud-covered corpses in a chapel of rest in Bedford Hospital. For no fewer than five years this NHS Trust hospital had had insufficient mortuary space to accommodate their dead bodies; this situation had been exacerbated by faults with the existing mortuary, for which none of the hospital's managers would take responsibility.

The local Unison official said that the management had repeatedly brushed away the protests of staff at the bodies being kept in an unrefrigerated chapel of rest and so he took his complaint to the press. It seemed to me that it was necessary to prove that this practice had been going on, since a story unaccompanied by any image could be denied, or cause the management to hide the evidence.

The result of publishing a front page image of the dumped ex-patients was dramatic. A rapidly conducted report concluded that there had been "failings in the management processes and management accountability at the Trust" and the chief executive resigned. The mortuary was repaired and the chapel of rest returned to its proper function.

Yet what I remember most from this episode was the fury of readers at our decision to publish the photograph of the dumped bodies. "I am appalled ..." was the most common opening of many letters from those who said they would never buy the paper again. So I understand the reluctance of editors to run with images which portray the reality of disaster and war.

In the case of Libya, however, there is an additional reason for displaying editorial courage and risk shocking or offending viewers and readers. As Anderson Cooper of CNN told his audience last week, "I want to warn you right now, it's very difficult stuff, very hard to take, but we are determined to show you the reality of what's happening. The Gaddafi regime does not want you to see these images ... they are already sweeping the blood off the streets." These are the images which might ultimately form part of the body of evidence necessary to convict Gaddafi of war crimes.

Sixty-five years ago the most notable of all war crimes trials took place, in Nuremberg. There was no shortage of horrifying footage, whether taken by the British liberators of Bergen-Belsen, or the Americans in Buchenwald. Naturally, it would not have been necessary for such film to be made available to the general public in order for the trial to be brought to a successful conclusion. The public dissemination of those dreadful images after the liberation of the Nazis' concentration camps had an even more important function, however. This was not to convince our own people that we had been fighting on the right side, but to demonstrate to the German people that they had been fighting on the wrong side.

Even after being made to see the visible truth of what Nazism stood for, many, if not most, Germans still found it impossible to accept the truth: Hitler's henchmen, after all, seemed to them to be men of fine standing, husbands who kissed their wives when they came back from their daily work, and tucked their children into bed. One thing we can say with confidence is that Holocaust denial would be a much more widespread phenomenon if it had not been for the timely release of footage which even today has the capacity to make us turn away in shock and repulsion.

Today, in fact, the control of imagery, even in dictatorships, is breaking down – thanks to mobile telephony and the internet. It was not necessary for journalists to smuggle themselves into Iran for the regime's brutality towards its opponents to be made visibly manifest to the outside world. The footage of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan by one of the Iranian government's thugs during the election protests of 2009 was captured by bystanders and instantly circulated across the globe via the internet. Eventually the established news media began to re-circulate the images of the assassination of an unarmed and peaceful protester; but I wonder if any of the commercial channels would have dared to show such footage if it had been captured by one of their own cameras. I suspect that they would have self-censored.

It may be that the established media have become more conservative and cautious in such matters, even as the internet has become a zone of sometimes grotesque free-for-all. Forty-three years ago, Western news agencies were prepared to show pictures and footage of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam's national police chief, executing a prisoner said to be a Vietcong captain, during the Tet offensive: the pictures hastened the American public's disillusionment with the Vietnam War.

Images of massacre can of course have entirely the opposite effect, as our governments are all too aware. The former US Secretary of State James Baker wrote in his 1995 memoirs: "In Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda ... among others, the real-time coverage of conflict by the electronic media has served to create a powerful new imperative for prompt action that was not present in a less frenetic time." I'm not sure that this is as new as Baker thought; but there's no doubt that, for example, vivid images of massacres in Libya would increase the public pressure on the UN Security Council to impose a no-fly zone on Gaddafi's regime. Would that be such a bad thing?

d.lawson@independent.co.uk