Julia Carrie WongI don’t know if it’s good for us as a society that we’ve created the expectation that normal members of the public should be regularly exposed to traumatic imagery of violent crimes in the course of staying up to date on the news.
This comes on a day when news consumers are getting a constant stream of foreboding quotes about footage of the killing of Tyre Nichols, and a week in which news outlets ran footage of a man fighting for his life against a mass shooter, a week when The NYT autoplayed footage from the immediate aftermath of the shooting that killed Halyna Hutchins.
This is not to say that news outlets shouldn’t publish footage that’s of public interest. But I do wonder if we’re providing our audiences with enough information about the potential benefit of limiting the amount they are exposed to. Not everyone needs to bear witness to every horror. Being informed doesn’t and shouldn’t require exposure to first hand traumatic material.