From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Revulsion at the Boston Phoenix
Is a three-month-old snuff film news?
The Boston Phoenix, a respectable "alternative" weekly, posted a link on its Web site last week to the video of Daniel Pearl's killing--the one sent by his Islamist captors in February as proof of his hideous death. In its print edition, the Phoenix also published a photograph of Pearl's severed head--taken from the video--alongside an editorial justifying the paper's decision to set up the link.
Since Pearl was on the staff of The Wall Street Journal at the time of his murder in Pakistan, a collegial passion drives my objection to the paper's actions. Yet I'd make the same criticisms, and with equally adamant conviction, had Pearl not worked for the Journal.
One could light into the Phoenix on a number of grounds, not least the pain it has inflicted on Pearl's widow, Mariane. She went on record last month, when CBS aired snippets from the same video on Dan Rather's show, saying that the network's decision was "heartless"--which indeed it was. "It is beyond our comprehension," she said, "that any mother, wife, father or sister should have to relive this horrific tragedy."
The "heartless" CBS segment was confined to a few seconds of nonviolent but hair-raising footage, in which a clearly wilting Pearl said "My father's Jewish; my mother's Jewish; I'm Jewish." The Phoenix, which can't have been unaware of Mrs. Pearl's views, chose to link to the entire video--unexpurgated.
The fact that Mrs. Pearl doesn't want the pictures of her husband's murder to be in the public domain is not, of itself, morally dispositive. Perhaps this case is an exception, but as a general principle, people who are the subjects of news stories--or their families--don't get to decide how they are covered in the media.
But for a responsible paper, the opinion of Pearl's widow shouldn't amount to nothing. A philosophical question is whether one's view of the Phoenix's judgment would be different if Mrs. Pearl had made no objection. It's likely it might be; and this shows that public revulsion--often a reliable indicator of wrong or right--rests in important measure on the hurt being heaped on Mrs. Pearl.
It's clear that the Phoenix's editor, Stephen Mindich, wasn't unmindful of the censure that would come his way. Talking to the Los Angeles Times, he appealed to a higher authority than the widow--the victim himself. He said: "If Daniel had his choice, he'd want it seen."
Not only is this assertion unverifiable, but, viewed in the worst light, it is an attempt to leech moral authority from the victim. This is just one of the sophistries proffered by the Phoenix. There are others in the editorial in which its actions are explained.
The shallowest of these is a variant of that old chestnut--the public's right to know--which is here rendered as the public's need to see. Why see? Because seeing will generate "repugnance" in the viewer that "has value in reminding us . . . what anti-American terrorists are capable of."
This is specious because the public already knows that Pearl was decapitated. Our horror has already been inflamed by knowledge of his fate. Watching the act won't add a layer of understanding, but only one of repugnance--which, to the Phoenix, is a desirable end in itself. What we are to do with this sensation, other than be churned up by it, Mr. Mindich does not say.
What he does say is that he is only doing what others have done. "How many times have we seen . . . the Challenger explosion? Or looked at photos of the aftermath of . . . Oklahoma City? Should Life have refused to publish the first photos taken of the concentration camps? Or the photo of a South Vietnamese intelligence chief shooting a . . . Viet Cong prisoner in the head?"
Here, the editor attempts to put a respectable gloss on a doubtful case of conscience. The Phoenix used a picture of Pearl's severed head, an image more explicit than the others cited, with the possible exception of some pictures of the Holocaust. The latter would arguably have been unimaginable to anyone who hadn't been to the camps, or seen photos--and so it was necessary to show people what had happened. Pearl's murder, by contrast, was fully comprehended; so the visuals are gratuitous.
As for the other examples in the editorial, they were all news stories covered visually in real time. The pictures added to our understanding. The Phoenix published its picture and link more than three months after Pearl's death, giving us nothing we didn't already possess--except for a self-righteous justification and a new texture of horror.
One might add that the Pearl case is distinctive, too, because the victim isn't an entire ethnicity, as in the Holocaust, or a group of people in one iconic or symbolic place (as in the World Trade Center, or the space shuttle, or a government building in Oklahoma), but a single man selected as macabre example. Showing pictures of his death seems uniquely insensitive to the dignity and humanity of that one man and his family.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor and chief television and media critic of The Wall Street Journal.
