Would you publish a picture of a drowning child on the front page of a newspaper?

Would you publish a picture of a drowning child on the front page of a newspaper? What if the child is not American? What if they were poor? Would that make a difference? These were some of the issues we had to tackle during my first month of journalism school at UC Berkeley.

The exercise was based on a real life incident that had happened in a small American town. A news photographer had snapped a picture of the child's grieving father, who was holding his son's body in his arms. The picture was reminiscent of Michelangelo's Pieta. If memory serves, the paper went with a less dramatic picture, below the fold.

The Washington Post home page, with the picture that most U.S news outlets used. 

That memory came back, not particularly welcome, during a visit to the Newseum in Washington, DC on Sept. 3, 2015. You've probably seen the news, by now. A 3-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, drowned while fleeing the conflict tearing his homeland apart. Most major American newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal) used the picture of a police officer carrying the boy's body to go with the story. The boy's face is not visible, while the police officer's sorrow clearly is. Even the Daily News went with that shot, above a headline reading "The Dead Sea" (ha ha, not). News outlets used the picture on social media, but not on their home pages. Some, including the Post and the Journal, used it on their front page (though you have to wonder if that even counts, these days).

This is what we learned that day at Cal: respect for the victims and their family, which has to be balanced against news value. We talked about how the pictures of children dying in under-developed countries were more likely to end up on newspaper's front pages, as if they deserved less respect in death--and somehow in life too.

Of course, there were far more graphic pictures that didn't make it into U.S. newspapers, on their home pages and social feeds. There is a shocking and heart wrenching  picture of the dead little boy lying face down in the sand. In a larger crop, a police officer is looking at the body, shoulders hunched. In a tighter crop, there is nothing by the desolate small body.

This is the picture, cropped or not, that most of the rest of the world is now looking at, from Ireland to Dubai. The shock value is obvious. Kudos to Dubai's Gulf News for its "Humanity Washed Ashore" headline.

I can see both sides of the argument. One the one hand, this is a horrendous situation, made worse by Europe's refusal to truly confront the crisis. A shocking picture might serve as a call to action--assuming--very charitably--that this was the media outlets' intention. On the other, using the more shocking picture definitely smells of exploitation to me, in the hope that the image will go viral. And the boy and his grieving family deserve to be treated with respect.

So I go back to that discussion, 18 years ago now, about what our values need to be as journalists--and I side with most American editors today.

More on the boy's story and home pages from around the world in this Wall Street Journal video.

Also in this excellent New York Times piece.