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Violence: How Much Is Too Much?

Humans can be considered very aggressive by nature. Their history of war, blood and violence attests to their growing need to conquer at all costs. Now there is a more silent way of satisfying this thirst for destruction, and that is through the media. People seem to be glorified by seeing something that would ignite a pumping heart and feelings of disgust. The question is.. How much should be shown?

Note: Although the below article mentions key events, this thread is NOT about those events but about how much should be shown.

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There's a dirty secret that every journalist who has ever covered a war knows: it's far worse than we ever show. The real images of war, what really happens, rarely, if ever, make it back to you, the viewers or the readers. Why? We feel that some images are just too much to take. That no one would watch, that no one could bear to watch. And what to do about terrorism? None of the television networks showed those horrific tapes of hostages being beheaded. But they are available on the Internet, and by all accounts, are quite popular. Why? Why would anyone want to see something like that? Do you have to see the pictures to truly understand how horrific death is?

This has become something of a political issue too. Everything is political these days. At least one self-described conservative radio outlet played the audio of one of the hostages being beheaded. Their explanation was that the public needed to know the truth about the enemy, just how brutal they really are. And there was some sense that the media, i.e. Us, was censoring this out of some political bias. There was also the position that something was needed to offset those pictures of prisoner abuse in Iraq, to show that the other side is much worse.

Well, I'm one of those who has wrestled with this issue first-hand. The danger in being too careful, of showing too little, is that war looks clean and easy. Those pictures of smart-bombs going in the window of a building in grainy black-and-white make war look like a poor-quality video game. Clean it up too much and I think it makes war too easy to accept. And it's not. It's the worst thing on earth. But we have stories to tell, and if we include the worst of the images, then we know that no one will stick around to watch. We shoot those images. I know for a fact that more often than I like to remember, my camera crew and I have been the last thing that dying people have seen. I fully expect to be held accountable for that in some way. And many of those images were never shown. One very experienced cameraman was with us in Rwanda. He was filming two little boys who were minutes from death. In the end, he rolled back over the pictures. He couldn't bear, as a human being, to record their final moments. We are, after all, people as well as journalists.

And what do you all want to see? In Iraq today, videos of beheadings and the bodies of American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Somalia, are very popular. Before we get outraged however, we should remember that not too many years ago there was a video series in this country called Faces of Death, which was a compilation of pictures of people dying violent deaths. Sold a whole lot of copies. Do you need to see the worst to truly understand? Has terrorism changed all this; is it important to see the details of the worst of the terrorist acts? Most outlets still don't show the pictures of people jumping from the burning World Trade Towers on 9/11. Do you need to see those to truly experience the horror that those people must have faced in making that horrible choice?
Ref. Leroy Sievers and the Nightline Staff Nightline Offices.

Much Too Much Violence

Well, this is a difficult balancing act, for sure. I don't know where the line should be drawn, but I definately have no desire to see the beheadings shown on television for example or to watch anyone as they are dying. That is too much for me. I could not handle it. We must also remember that children are around when the evening news is on. I don't think they should be subjected to such images.

I don't think I need to see an event take place to understand that it is horrific. I don't need to see someone beheaded to understand how awful it was. It can be described in enough detail without my seeing it.

The real danger to showing all of this stuff in every minute detail is not that it will horrify us, but rather that we will become desensitized to it. We cannot watch such horror each day without our minds finding a way to block out how awful it is. So, rather than have the effect of making us understand how bad war is, it might actually make it less horrible to us - not a first, but eventually.

Think about what used to pass as horror in movies in TV. People used to really be scared by the horror movies shown in the 1950's and 1960's. Now, our movies are much more gory and because we have become accustomed to such gore, the stuff filmed in the 50's and 60's doesn't scare us at all. We have adjusted to a level where that stuff just isn't scary to us any more. I think this could happen with our news as well, if we didn't censor what was shown.