"Western foreign policy in recent years has combined with the democratisation of filmed images to create a stark new problem for media organisations: the existence of images of regime-changed leaders before, during and after the moment of death. Scenes of the hanging of Saddam Hussein were widely broadcast and printed, as snuff shots of Osama bin Laden surely also would have been if the American government had not decided (correctly, I think) to suppress the material filmed by its hit squad.
And the pictures of the terrified, wounded and then possibly dead Muammar Gaddafi used on TV bulletins and the print and online editions of newspapers in the last 24 hours seemed to me to be, by some distance, the most graphic and distressing representations we have ever seen of a recognisable individual during his final moments."
By Mark Lawson | The Guardian /more
1 comment:
I have deliberately avoided seeing even one photograph of Gaddafi at the end of his life (except the one I accidentally saw here on your blog). It makes me ashamed as a human to see the way our media show photos of people dying.
He was apparently a very bad man, but that's no excuse for the way the media behave.
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