Death on TV
by brendan on 02/12/2010Is it okay to knowingly broadcast somebody’s death on TV? I may be numb to most violence on TV, but something about showing an actual death just doesn’t sit well with me.
I read online today that Georgian Olympian Nodar Kumaritashvili died in a tragic Luge accident. He appears to have been going upwards of 90 mph when he took a turn too high and lost control of his sled, throwing him from the track and into an unpadded metal column. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter at a local hospital, but from the described efforts to “revive” Nodar by first responders on the scene, I would say there is good chance he was killed on impact.
A quick Google search yields no shortage of videos showing Nodar’s death. Some preface the video with a warning about the graphic nature, and some don’t. CNN ran a video showing the last few frames before impact – so they showed a man about to lose his life. And my local NBC affiliate ran an evening news story accompanied by the full video, with no warning to viewers of how graphic the video might be.
Can you imagine what this is like for Nodar’s friends and family? This is a huge story, and they probably won’t be able to escape the footage. They’ll be confronted with having to see their son/friend/brother die on TV, over and over again. That’s pretty horrific.
Should we be allowed to knowingly watch somebody die? Violence seems generally accepted; that gets shown on TV every day and nobody blinks. It also seems okay to show death, past tense, as mangled car wrecks and body bags on stretchers are also common fare for the news. I guess I just assumed that not showing people die was some sort of conscious choice. Instead, it seems that news organizations just didn’t have good footage of death to show. Now that they have it, they’re more than happy to run with it like it’s no big deal.
I was discussing this with co-workers and one of them pointed out that it isn’t much different than coverage of the Haiti earthquake, where they are showing people on the verge of dying. And they’re right, that isn’t a whole lot different. But I don’t think I’ve actually seen coverage in Haiti of somebody die, just lots of destruction. So it’s at least a little different.
I don’t know. Am I blowing this out of proportion? Is there death on TV all the time already and I just wasn’t paying attention?
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