[WikiEN-l] Potentially offensive pictures

Sat Jan 10 20:29:12 UTC 2004

Erik Moeller wrote:
> Are they? It's been a while since I last watched TV, but my impression  
> always was that US TV is more violent than Euro-TV. I may be wrong, of  
> course.

I watch a lot of US TV.

In the US, television news rarely shows graphic images of blood and
guts, but "if it bleeds it leads" they love to cover bloody stories.
If there's been a horrible car accident, we will see only a body under
a clean white sheet, or a child's shoe in a gutter.  The most popular
war footage is the twisted wreckage of vehiciles but actual dead
people are virtually never seen.

Movies and television shows are similar -- lots of cartoon violence,
but very little realistic blood and guts.

I might or might not agree with the specific answers that Erik gave
here, but I would agree with his overall approach -- context matters,
and mostly it just depends on the demands of quality writing and sound
factual presentation of information.  Editorial good taste can go a
long way towards balancing competing concerns responsibly.

And there will always be hard cases that are tough to decide.  We
aren't the first to confront these issues, and I doubt if we will come
up with a magic formula that will always resolve the issues cleanly.

--Jimbo