A photo depicted dead children in Gaza
A reader was scrolling through her news feed when she clicked on an NPR headline about an air assault in Gaza and found herself looking at a photo of dead children. She was upset by the picture and immediately felt as if the people she was looking at were being exploited. Then she got angry that NPR didn't warn her and give her a choice about whether to see it.
It was a natural and empathetic reaction to a powerful news photo. On behalf of this reader, we reached out to ask about the decision-making at NPR around this particular image, as well as the general policies about graphic photos. Keep reading to see the letter we received, what we learned from NPR and our specific advice.
Newsrooms everywhere create policies for making sensitive choices. These policies are designed to guide the decisions that journalists make every day across the organization. The work of creating daily news, whether it's a website, a newspaper or a broadcast show, typically is broken down into specific steps and dispersed across many specialists and disciplines.
Like in many jobs, there's an element of factory production to the work. Every decision rolls up into an end result that is designed to help people see, feel and comprehend a
