<p>NSM:</p>
<p>While I understand that perspective, I also like to internalize these things at times and consider what I’d think if I were the one involved in the story. For me, I’d like the line drawn at actually showing the dead body as was done in this article. I consider it unnecessary to the story versus the undue grief apparently caused to family and other people who saw the article. regardless of what they’re legally allowed to print, there’s a point at which good taste and relevance no longer applies.</p>
<p>If I were the one involved in the story, of course I wouldn’t want any stories or pictures at all. I also wouldn’t be looking at the papers or TV stations to see any news that was broadcasted or published. I think that anyone would feel like that. Anyone who was a friend or relative of the victim would not only not want stories or pictures, they wouldn’t want the accident to have happened. </p>
<p>However, that isn’t the way the world works. Horrible things happen and they end up in the newspaper and on TV. </p>
<p>If the media were to make its decisions based on what victims and their families wanted, there would be very little news published or broadcasted.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I still think that the picture was a very compassionate way to cover a tragedy. The kind of pictures that I don’t like are the ones with close-ups of grieving relatives at tragedy scenes. Those are the ones that make me cringe.</p>
<p>Don’t you think a picture of the wrecked car would have sufficed? It still would have been painful for family and friends but probably not to the degree of having the dead body shown whether it was only legs or not.</p>
<p>I checked the picture out very carefully, even looking for other ways of cropping it. To me, what makes the picture notable are the expressions on the paramedics’ faces, people who appear to be at most, just a few years older than was the victim. </p>
<p>The wrecked car isn’t enough. One could, however, cut out the victim’s legs, leaving just a bit of his backside in the picture, just enough so that the viewer would realize that the paramedics were standing and kneeling over the victim, but that still wouldn’t give the poignancy to the picture that exists with his legs and shoes in it. There is an innocence and youth in the jeans clad legs and sneaker clad shoes that adds to the picture’s poignancy.</p>
<p>The picture as published is very powerful – showing the grief, compassion, and helplessness of the paramedics as they vainly tried to save a teen whose death (if he was indeed speeding) was probably due to his own carelessness</p>
<p>It’s a picture that as published would be a far stronger deterrent than just showing the wrecked car. It brings home the fact that people do die due to driving misjudgments. It’s a picture that I would think that many parents would be showing their teens.</p>
<p>Certainly it would be painful for family and friends to see the picture just as it is painful for family and friends to see pictures of any tragedy (or to read stories about tragedies that their loved ones have been involved in). However, that’s the case in virtually any picture of tragedies in which bodies are shown, something that is routinely done and sometimes is done gratuitously, something that didn’t occur in this case.</p>