Rip the Band-Aid off.

(Capstone essay, written Jan. 2007)

Our business has one overarching principle that is not to be trifled with: Inform citizens. A naïve or misinformed citizenry cripples a democracy. Yet in the increasingly sanitized news industry, journalists are being told that some realities are just too real.

The New York Times was recently berated by the military for publishing a photograph and videotape of a soldier dying in Iraq. The images upset the soldier’s family and incensed the Army, which said the images were released without official consent. According to the story the Times ran with the photo last week, the soldier was shot in the head during a patrol on Haifa Street in Baghdad. The photo of the soldier showed a medic attending to his head wound, at which point the soldier was still alive; the story said he died later in the day. A five-minute video of the shooting went on the Times Web site.

I’ve followed the case on Romenesko, and the issue of “propriety” in war coverage is at the heart of the debate. Was it appropriate for the NYT to shock its kind, unscathed readers by accurately reporting a man’s death? What was the NYT showing its readers that U.S. troops haven’t seen on a daily basis for the past four years? Certainly, we don’t want to disgust our readers every day, but our primary obligation does not include protecting them from feeling sad or upset. Withholding these stories infantilizes the readers.

Maybe I’m a zealot; the conservative pundits would brand me an “activist, loose constructionist editor,” but frankly, if we’re going to inform our citizens about a war (or an election, or a trial, or a city council meeting) we have to do it with a “rip the Band-Aid off fast” strategy. The wars our country fights are not fought on American ground. We don’t have to see the carnage. But we should. It’s easy to forget the war is even happening with the rosy picture the government describes.

The Houston Chronicle story on Romenesko quoted Tom Rosenstiel on the subject: “‘The fact that a photograph upset people, even family members, is not always sufficient reason not to run it,’ Rosenstiel said. ‘Editors may decide that there is a compelling public interest in running a photograph precisely because it does upset an audience.’”

The problem of timid journalists ultimately boils down to the way media is treated as a commodity instead of a public service. We’ve coddled our audience, made them like us so they keep coming back to us, and we make money, and our advertisers make money, and our owners make lots of money, and everyone loses some knowledge and democracy loses its spark. ‘Don’t publish that story, it makes [the government/the army/the company who owns this paper] look bad. People don’t want the news to depress them, print something less sad.’