BBC -- The British and Irish evening news presenters announced the beheading of American hostage Eugene Armstrong tonight but I won't be pointing to the video file of the event, just as I wouldn't run a graphic still sequence of the beheading in a newspaper. Google understands the issue and programs its AdSense server to provide only Public Service Advertisements on pages discussing this violence.
It's all down to editorial judgment and I don't collect, edit and report on beheadings. I have seen an assassination and the freeze frame imagery that burned into my brain, on a hot and sticky day in the 80s, is something I will not expose an unwitting viewer to observe. There are things about chopping meat that unsettle people enough to convert them to vegeterianism. There are psychological facts associated with gory imagery that cannot go undenied. Showing graphic violence brings with it the baggage of long-term psychological side effects for viewers. Bloggers, editors and reporters who don't appreciate that fact need to analyse the subculture they are feeding as well as the unwitting impact they are making on unsuspecting viewers.
I have seen the years of psychoanalysis that friends had to seek on the heels of surviving or witnessing a traumatic event. It does not advance the cause of the human condition to promote or expose the sight and sound of gory events to a blood-thirsty pack of voyeurs. One hour after the wire services announced the beheading, a minimum of two people a minute stopped by here to see what I had to offer. So sorry.
Also: -- "Another beheading"
Mass Communications and Culture -- "The ethics of gore and the perverse"
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