What to show
It was the day before Dwyer’s sentencing on fraud charges. He called a news conference in Harrisburg and after reading a statement, with cameras rolling, he put a gun in his mouth and fired.
Most Pennsylvania TV stations got the footage around a half-hour later. Most only showed Dwyer brandishing the gun. A couple showed him putting the gun in his mouth, but cut away before he pulled the trigger. Three showed him pulling the trigger.
A similar range of decisions was on display within the first few hours of the shooting of journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward and local official Vicki Gardner in Moneta, Virginia.
At first, NBC News froze the video before the shooting started. “We’re not going to show you the entire sequence,” the anchor said. Later, though, the network posted a warning that the video “may be disturbing to some viewers,” then ran the entire clip.
CBS News warned viewers orally that the footage would be disturbing, then showed it.
ABC froze the video at the moment when Parker appeared to have been shot – perhaps the least palatable approach. Not surprisingly, WDBJ-TV, the station Parker and Shaw worked for, shied away.
“We are choosing not to run the video of that right now,” station manager Jeff Marks said, “because frankly, we don’t need to see it again, and our staff doesn’t need to see it again.”
Which raises the fundamental question about such video: Does anybody need to see it?
Unlike the mainstream news organizations, social media managers decided that the answer was no: While the broadcast and cable giants showed the interview footage shot by Adam Ward for WDBJ, Facebook and Twitter took down the images recorded by shooter Vester Lee Flanagan on his cell phone.