22 November 2008
Seeking a more serious spin on world news
7 May 2006
Commentary by Carmen Gray: Te Waha Nui Online
Foreign coverage pictures get little front page treatment in the New Zealand media. Even such a major international story as Abu Ghraib and the torture pictures were relegated to the world section when the scandal first broke. Why papers downplay world news.
A recent New Zealand Herald front page pictured an accident in which one car had landed on top of another.
“Stacked: No-one got more than a fright in this crash,” read the caption.
Like a carnival ride, it offered readers a thrill without any painful baggage.
“If you are ever going to be in an accident, that’s probably the accident to be in,” the driver was quoted as saying in the accompanying article.
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Very different from another vivid photograph on the BBC World News website. It showed a group of naked Iraqi prisoners stacked on top of one another in a perverse imitation of an American cheerleader pyramid.
Clearly not an accident, and the victims got much more than just a fright. After all, if you’re ever going to be in a prison, Abu Ghraib is probably not the kind to be in.
But this second photograph didn’t feature as a leading picture in the Herald. Nor have any others of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison since the scandal first broke around the world in 2004.
Pivotal atrocity
How did it happen that such a pivotal human rights atrocity involving the army of the lone world superpower could be so easily relegated to the mid-section of the Herald, while minor entertainment routinely takes pride of place?
Of course, with so much going on in the world, not everything can get front page coverage.
But when the Herald printed two of the Abu Ghraib abuse pictures in its world section on May 4, 2004, the leading picture and story was taken up with the trivial entertainment “news” of ousted New Zealand Idol competitor Camilla Temple talking about her fame.
And when the Herald printed a further selection of newly released torture pictures on February 17 this year and they were again in the middle of the paper, the front page lead was nothing more world-shattering than a day at the cricket. It pictured Shane Bond jubilant after a West Indies game.
As for the stacked cars which appeared as leading photo on March 3, could it have been the inevitable result of a slow news day? Perhaps, if you think Saddam Hussein’s trial – quietly nestled in the world section that day – is no biggie.
Herald deputy editor Jeremy Rees doesn’t think his paper is too focused on human interest or entertainment at the expense of serious news.
“We’re trying to put something on the front that is worthwhile to read and is not silly,” he says.
Drawing attention
But he concedes the Herald could do more to draw attention to serious international issues.
“Yes, we should lead a lot more with world stories because we’re a small country and there ain’t a hell of a lot of news around.”
While the paper does have a policy of trying to put a major world news story on its front page every day, the final result is always a compromise due to a need to cater to the paper’s two different audiences, he says.
There are the regular subscribers, who are more interested in hard news but are going to have their paper duly delivered every day regardless of what is on the front. Then there are those who just purchase the Herald from time to time, perhaps lured by a surprising front page.
“People who walk past and buy it in a dairy are more likely to be interested in a car than by what’s going on in Iraq,” he says.
Here, it seems, is the crux. Entertaining pictures sell papers, but images of war and abuse don’t. And concerns over circulation often act as the invisible editor.
Pressure to sell
“There’s always pressure to sell. We’re a commercial organisation,” says Rees.
“In fact, one of my publishers told me the other day that we’re putting too much on Iraq and beatings and so forth on the cover and giving people far too much stuff they don’t want to read. He said we should have gone bigger with the Rolling Stones announcement.”
Or a car crash. The highest-selling copy of the Herald on Sunday last year featured the arresting image of a car accident in the middle of snow on a deserted road. So it seems the photograph of the stacked cars that was lead picture on March 3 adheres to a successful commercial formula.
“On just about all newsworthy bases it doesn’t figure, but on surprise- yeah, that works,” Rees says of the image. “The main thing is to grab attention, and it’s usually the one-off weird picture that will stop people.”
But if weirdness sells, surely it doesn’t get much weirder than a human pyramid of stacked Iraqi prisoners.
Rees couldn’t remember why the Herald didn’t put any of the torture pictures on the front of the Herald when they came out, but said “I would suspect that it was a question of taste.”
Question of context
The question of taste tends to turn on context. What are we using pictures for when we show them, and in what way will an audience look at them?
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The original purpose of the photographs was, of course, much worse than tasteless. They came from CDs compiled by Specialist Charles Graner when posted at Abu Ghraib, given as a “souvenir” to another soldier. The pictures had been taken by soldiers “just for fun”, investigator Paul Arthur testified at the trial of Private Lynndie England.
England features prominently in the images abusing prisoners.
Certainly, not everyone saw the photographs as a thrill. The recipient of the “souvenir” handed it in, after being shocked by what he saw. As was the rest of the world, when some of the leaked images were disseminated through the international news media.
When the United States Government attempted to suppress the full set of images and were challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union in court, questions of taste and the usage of images was at the heart of the debate.
The Government said releasing the pictures would humiliate the prisoners by subjecting them to public curiosity, in breach of the Geneva Convention.
Sparking debate
The ACLU argued the pictures are too significant to hide from the public, as they reveal military practices at Abu Ghraib and are powerful tools for sparking debate on what caused the apparent breakdown of command discipline at the prison. The judge agreed.
But the mood the New Zealand Herald has created for its front page shackles its ability to use that space for such political mobilisation.
By so often reverting to quirkily entertaining or sporty pictures as front-page crowd- pullers, the Herald is routinely training readers to greet its leading picture of the day with the question “what fun can I get from this?”, rather than “what can this picture teach me about the world?”
As it commonly uses leading pictures as bait for commercial motives, rather than as documents to inform, its taste threshold for images is inevitably low.
A leading picture of the torture of Iraqis in the New Zealand Herald would no doubt be more difficult to read in this context as an informative document on the abuse, separated from Graner’s original purpose as a tool for entertainment.
And undoubtedly Herald readers would like to distinguish what they do for fun from the pastimes enjoyed by Graner. Cricket or carnival rides? Sure. Sadistic abuse? Not for their eyes thanks.
Sure, the pictures are there on the internet if we want to look for them. But the people who take the time to search them out already know and care about the abuses.
Power of photographs
The power of a photograph on the front of a paper to shock a person walking past a dairy with its split-second impact is surely sometimes a responsibility, rather than just a commercial opportunity – a responsibility which should rank political accountability over thrills and spills and good sporting fun.
When speaking to a group of American reporters outside the courthouse at the beginning of his trial, Graner displayed a flagrant disregard for the causality of serious events and a happy-go-lucky faith in the entertaining.
“Whatever happens is going to happen, but I still feel it’s going to be on the positive side and I’m going to have a smile on my face,” he said. Surely, not an attitude our newspapers would want to encourage.
- Carmen Gray is a Graduate Diploma in Journalism student at AUT University. She wrote this commentary as part of a media ethics assignment in the Public Affairs Reporting paper.
- Amnesty International – One year after Abu Ghraib, torture continues
- Abu Ghraib to close (Guardian Unlimited)
- Other Media Ethics articles
- Media Ethics Online magazine
