by Joan Smith, Executive Director, Hacked OffWhen terrorists attacked the Bardo museum in Tunis last month, they murdered 22 people before being killed themselves. Most of the victims were tourists, including a British woman, but a Tunisian police officer also died in the assault. The attack was the latest in a series of atrocities carried out by Islamist extremists this year, beginning with the murders at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January. On that occasion, the lethal assault on the magazine’s staff was followed by the murders of two police officers and a siege at a Jewish supermarket.

After the Bardo attack, at least two British newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Star, published shocking photographs of the dead terrorists; their faces were pixelated but the Star showed one of the men with a pool of blood surrounding his head. A month earlier, when a lone gunman was killed in Copenhagen following lethal attacks on a café and a synagogue, The Times published a photograph of the dead man lying outside his house (see above). In each case, newspapers which published pictures of corpses appeared to make a distinction between victims, whose bodies were not shown, and perpetrators.This is not always the case. After the Charlie Hebdo murders, most British newspapers published still photos from an amateur video of the attack on one of the police officers, Ahmed Merabet. The pictures showed the wounded officer lying on the pavement, pleading for his life before one of the terrorists shot him again. Some newspapers pixelated the officer’s face but others did not, showing a terrified man seconds from being murdered in cold blood. The justification, if it existed, was presumably that this was a huge news story and readers deserved to see for themselves what happened.The Editors’ Code of Practice (a set of rules drawn up by a group of press industry executives, without consultation with the public or working journalists) does not directly address the issue of whether or not to publish photographs of dead bodies or of people who know or fear that they are about to be murdered. But Clause 5 (i) deals with ‘intrusion into grief or shock’, directing that journalistic enquiries must be made with ‘sympathy and discretion’ and publication ‘handled sensitively’. As recently as four years ago, even the discredited Press Complaints Commission ruled that the Daily Record was wrong to publish a picture of the loosely covered body of a man which had been found on a footpath near Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh.Findings of a code breach were as a rare as gold dust under the PCC, which went out of its way to avoid acknowledging that the Code had been broken – a tradition now enthusiastically endorsed by its equally weak successor, IPSO. On this occasion, however, the PCC not only recognised a breach but issued a comment by its then director, Stephen Abell. ‘This was a difficult case, but the commission ruled that the use of the image crossed a line’, he said. ‘The adjudication is an important addition to the PCC’s case law under Clause 5 of the Editors’ Code, and editors should learn the lesson from it’. [emphasis added]But some editors appear to have learned no such lessons. Newspapers which have signed up to IPSO remain bound by the Code but in the intervening period, publication of pictures of corpses has become much more frequent. So has the use of photographs which show the seconds before someone is murdered, while there is at least one recent case of pictures showing the removal of bodies of murder victims. In September last year, several newspapers - including the Mirror (on the front page), Express and Daily Star - published photographs of body bags being removed from a beach in Thailand where two young Britons, David Miller and Hannah Witheridge, had been brutally attacked and murdered.It is hard to see how publication of this photograph squares with the ‘over-riding requirement’ – the phrase is from the PCC’s judgement in the Daily Record case - that publication must be ‘handled sensitively’ when people are bereaved. It is bad enough to discover that a friend or relative has been murdered in a faraway country without being confronted with a picture of the body being unceremoniously removed from the murder scene; there is no public interest in publishing such photographs, which can only satisfy prurient curiosity. Indeed it is hard to believe that this kind of publication doesn’t also breach Clause 3 (ii), which holds that editors need to justify ‘intrusions into any individual’s private life without consent’. Grief is a time when the need for privacy is at its highest, which is presumably why the complaint from a relative – the aunt of the man whose body appeared in the Daily Record – was upheld by the PCC back in 2011.It is not as if we don’t have evidence of the impact of images of dead or dying people on relatives and friends. When Malek Merabet, brother of the murdered French police officer Ahmed Merabet, spoke at a press conference in Paris in January, he confronted media outlets which had shown the video of his brother’s murder. ‘How dare you take that video and broadcast it? I heard his voice. I recognised him. I saw him get slaughtered and I hear him get slaughtered every day’. The same strictures apply to still photographs, which were published so widely that they would have been impossible for relatives and friends to avoid. (The man who shot the video, Jordi Mir, said he was ‘completely panicked’ when he posted it online and took it down within 15 minutes. But the damage had already been done).The family of the American journalist James Foley, who was the first Western hostage murdered by ISIS in August last year, were shocked when images showing him just before he was beheaded were widely published; they asked media outlets to use a photograph of him working as a photojournalist instead. These images - taken from the ISIS video – were published in many British newspapers. At the time, in a blog for Hacked Off [https://hackinginquiry.org/comment/killing-as-spectacle-torture-murder-and-ethical-questions-for-the-press], I argued that using photographs from the video was unethical, amounting to both a breach of privacy and an intrusion into grief or shock. (These were, after all, pictures of someone undergoing extreme psychological torture.) The Sun and the Daily Mail, in their on-line editions, even published links to the ISIS video.When a second American journalist, Stephen Sotloff, was murdered in September, still pictures were published in British newspapers and The Sun published two minutes of the ISIS video on its website. Later that month, the first British hostage, David Haines, was murdered. Some British newspapers, including the Mirror, published stills from the videos on their front pages, while others chose not to do so.The Independent on Sunday, for which I write a weekly column, took a principled decision not to publish similar photographs from the video of a British hostage, Alan Henning, immediately before his murder in early October. Other newspapers, including The Sun, also said they had decided not to publish what were in effect propaganda images made by ISIS. This was only three weeks after The Sun’s published a still of Mr Henning being paraded in captivity, taken from the ISIS footage of Stephen Sotloff’s murder.In January of this year, Mr Henning's widow Barbara made clear the effects of these images on families when she urged Google to take action against websites which carried footage from the ISIS video of her husband.The press's approach to publishing pictures of dead or dying people is mired in confusion and inconsistency. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that the ethical questions thrown up by publishing pictures of dead terrorists have yet to be recognised. Some editors who do it might argue that we shouldn’t have sympathy for the jihadists, and in any case their relatives are unlikely to read the British press. This ignores the fact that the UK has many immigrant communities, which might include people who knew the dead men, and that British newspapers are both distributed abroad and available online.But there is a wider issue here, which has nothing to do with sympathy for terrorists. It is many years since this country abolished the death penalty, and even longer since executions were carried out in public. This is clearly right because the taking of life by the state, even when there has been a trial, is a very serious matter. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo killings and the Bardo attack, it was unlikely that the perpetrators would allow themselves to be taken alive. In each case, the state faced a stark moral choice, which was to kill the terrorists or risk the lives of more civilians and members of the security forces.The use by the press of images of dead gunmen simplifies that choice, turning a dreadful moral conflict into a Hollywood scenario of goodies versus baddies. It trivialises violent death, an effect which is hard to square with the ‘over-riding requirement’ that publication should be ‘handled sensitively’ at times of grief or shock.This is not to say there are no circumstances in which newspapers should publish pictures of dead bodies or people threatened with imminent death. But they are few and far between, as the Guardian’s media commentator Roy Greenslade argued after the killing of the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. Greenslade believed there was a public interest in publishing pictures of the dead dictator but added this caveat: ‘But, in general, I don’t think newspapers should carry pictures of dead people’. He is right, and it’s disturbing that this sensible and humane judgement is now being so widely ignored.(Additional research by Georgia Tomlinson)