The Columbia Journalism Review reported on the panel:

Viewers have more opportunities—some of them unavoidable—to stumble onto graphic content. This shift demands serious attention from news organizations. That’s compounded by the potential for psychological harm to journalists, whose jobs require them to work, sometimes extensively, with traumatic material. The answers aren’t simple, but the problems are clear.

CJR recapped comments from the four panel experts and concluded with Sam’s comments:

People who are not professional journalists upload much of this content, Gregory says. It’s unmediated and free to stream across the internet. A major problem arises when these images jump outside  their original context. Not only does that practice open the door to resharing false information, but it transports graphic material that had a specific purpose: to energize, enrage, or educate a particular community. “We see it in front of us, and we’re like, ‘Wow, that is horrendous,’ and often we’re missing the context around it,” he says. “I think that’s part of why we’re feeling confronted now.”

Read more about WITNESS’ perspective on when and how to share graphic imagery and how to contextualize it.

For journalists and human rights advocates, check out our new resource “Ethical Guidelines: Using Eyewitness Videos in Human Rights Reporting & Advocacy.”

Featured image via CJR.

Details:

Monday, September 21, 2015
Pulitzer Hall – Brown Institute for Media Innovation
6:15 pm – 8:00 pm

RSVP via Eventbrite here (recommended). 

Full description:

This year we’ve seen a number of people die on our screens, from the police officer Ahmed Merabet shot in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, to Walter Scott shot in the back as he ran from police in Charleston, to Alison Parker and Adam Ward shot live on air. We’ve seen CCTV footage of a woman ‘sucked’ into a faulty escalator in China, a live Periscope stream of the immediate aftermath of the Bangkok bombing, and images of refugee children washed onto Libyan beaches.

This panel discussion will examine the issues raised by death on the social web. Should audiences be protected from these images? Does responsibility differ for news organizations versus the social platforms? Are journalists and audiences becoming desensitized? What can we learn from history about similar ‘moment of death’ images? How does culture play into what is acceptable or not?

The panel will be moderated by Emily Bell, Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.  The event’s panelists include:

Sam Gregory
Program Director, Witness

Louise Roug
Global News Editor, Mashable

Bruce Shapiro
Executive Director, Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma
Senior Executive Director of Professional Programs, Columbia Journalism School

Barbie Zelizer
Raymond Williams Professor of Communication
Director, Scholars Program in Culture and Communication
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

For more from WITNESS on the questions surrounding how to ethically share graphic images of human rights abuses online, check out these recent blog posts by Sam Gregory:

Seeing Aylan Kurdi, Adam Ward and Alison Parker

Images of Horror: Whose Roles and What Responsibilities?

Featured image: Syrian refugees Alan and Galip Kurdi. Both boys drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while attempting to reach Greece with their parents earlier this month. Image via The BBC.