Sir. It was amusing to read my Rite and Reason piece (September 17th) described as "overheated" in a reply which was itself capable of melting a small igloo. Time to turn down the temperature and return to the points at issue.
I criticised the use of a photograph of an unnamed dead man on the cover of The Irish Times and Irish Independent of September 6th for two principal reasons.
First, such a representation I believe, demeans the dignity of the dead and is a cheapening of the experience of death; it is a truly horrible thought to think of my self or anyone I know and love, exposed in this way. Second, arguments that it's OK to use such photos because they produce good effects - such as helping the fight against crime - seem to me to be deeply flawed. This was precisely the argument used to justify public hangings and the display of severed heads in former times. It didn't do then, and it won't do now.
Pace my respondent, it is no answer to either of these arguments to assert that journalists are compassionate and well intentioned people (which I am sure they are). In truth, it is shocking to encounter, in a debate on such an important issue, a level of naivete - which claims that right is determined by reference to intention alone and that anyone suggesting otherwise must be guilty of bias.
When debating any form, of visual representation, we most address the question of who is portrayed and omitted and what effect this selectivity has. I have already suggested that we need to consider why so many of our well intentioned representations are of starving Africans. Many Africans have claimed that such images lead to no solution, but instead serve to perpetuate a misunderstanding of Africa as a place of natural catastrophe and its passive, helpless victims. There is a vital lesson to be drawn here for efforts to represent crime and its effects in Ireland.
Honourable contributions have been made to this debate on representation by many Irish media figures, from Professor John Horgan's analysis of coverage of the Ethiopean famine of the 1980s to the Trocaire/Studies "Images of Africa" conference in November 1995. Indeed Michael Buerk himself, invoked as an authority by Patsy McGarry, has acknowledged that in the light of such debate he would do things differently from his Ethiopian reports of 1984 (not 1986 as asserted by McGarry).
If the alternative to this debate is an ad hominem rant about people from a "nonsecular world" (who they?) biased against "the media", few people - journalists included - will have difficulty in identifying the better option. - yours, etc.,
Firhouse,
Dublin 24.