Printing Television

The rising use of sensational photographs as framing tools in newspapers is highly controversial. In this article, which was originally published in The Seventh Eye on May 16th, 2008, Noam Yuran, Lecturer at the College of Management, expands on this topic. Can we criticize print media for using the same methods as television? Or should we expect newspapers to offer an alternative to television?

The day after a Katyusha rocket hit a shopping mall in the southern city of Ashkelon, the front page of the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth featured a close-up photo of a torn, blood-stained, toddler-sized shoe. Mr. Oren Persico claimed in an article for The Seventh Eye that to a certain extent the photo was staged—the shoe is sitting on someone's hand and is posed for the shot. What's more, the hand serves as a measurement, emphasizing how small the shoe (and the injured child, of course) actually is. The headline next to the photo is also part of the show—"This is How the Visit to the Mall Ended". This is a very unusual case, in which the newspaper's main headline is actually meaningless without the photo, and it is an enlarged caption for the photo: the most basic and simple caption—"Just Look". The true headline is in fact the photo, and the photo, as has already been stated, was recreated especially for the newspaper.

What is wrong with that, you ask? One may claim that such an unusual event calls for unusual headlines. In a way the photo itself holds the answer to any claims against it. But this just increases the awkwardness—in a way, the photo and the headline leave the reader no choice, no space to react and no room to contemplate.

This last point isn't the most disturbing one, but it leads right to it—the way in which the photo and the headline belittle the reader, and finally belittle the victim too. Yes, despite their gestures of sorrow, at the end of the day they humiliate the victim too.

One could ask a simple question: The photo is indeed shocking, but can we not trust the reader to be shocked from the news that a two-and-a-half-year-old child was severely wounded by a rocket that hit a shopping mall? Just the information is quite enough, with or without the photos, to shock us. But the newspaper is offering a different kind of hierarchy—while the information is set in the background, the shock is the focal point. First we are shocked, and only then, if we turn the pages and read, do we find out why.

What we have before us is obvious—a newspaper longing to be a television. The newspaper is willingly surrendering its unique form as an alternative to television (less immediate and more distanced, and therefore more level-headed and diverse) in order to be as television-like as possible. This is true not only because of the emphasis on the photo and on the reader's emotions, but also in a deeper and more disturbing way. The newspaper strives to imitate the familiar ceremonial aspect of television reports on terrorist attacks, reports in which no one says anything and still everyone watches—everyone watches in order to take part in the event, everyone "watches together."

Similarly, the newspaper too tries to contain the readers' shock, thus transforming into a stage, on which the readers are shocked here and now. The newspaper must reflect their shock, and what's more—it is no longer enough that the readers be shocked by the events themselves, by reality and the facts. It is imperative that they be shocked by the photo which appears in the newspaper and that their shock be inseparable from the act of reading the paper—a cloning of a televised "live update."

This, at the end of the day, is the explanation for how this specific type of report, seemingly empathetic and emotional, humiliates the reader and the victim. Because the flipside of the newspaper's need to embody the reader's shock is that it wipes out any possibility of an authentic response of the reader. The newspaper's obvious demonstration of emotions leaves no room to identify with the victim. It's not important for you to identify with anything—that you read, think or imagine; what's important is that you are shocked in the "here and now" as part of your newspaper-reading experience.

You might say—but why should we criticize the newspaper for doing the same things television does? Perhaps you would be right. Television, at least, can claim that it has no choice—that's how television is done today. The newspaper, today, chooses to behave this way. We are now witnessing it making its choice. Tomorrow it, like television, may have no choice. It is because we are familiar with this type of reporting from television that we should demand that the newspaper choose to be different from it. Newspapers right of existence today is rooted in the alternative they present to television coverage, and not in their attempt to duplicate it. 

This article originally appeared in Hebrew on The Seventh Eye Website.