Site Presented By
Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
The Daniel Pearl video combines sick political logic with the imagery of a snuff film, and tells us nothing we didn't already know about his twisted assassins.
Jun 13, 2002 | Yes, I have looked at it.
The Daniel Pearl murder video is more grotesque, sickening and disturbing than can possibly be appreciated without a viewing. It's not only the brutality, more than adequately described elsewhere; and not only the spectacle of Pearl's degrading and futile participation in his captors' anti-Semitic script. There's also the video production itself. I expected a crude equivalent of one of those old ransom notes made from pasted-up newspaper headlines. Instead it is relatively slick and professional, a paranoid montage of tangentially related images putting the dead reporter at the center of global Jewish conspiracy and Islamic revenge fantasy. The logic is that of a cult like Lyndon LaRouche, the images those of a snuff film.
Over the last few days, debate has raged over whether the Boston Phoenix and its publisher, Steven Mindich, were justified in posting a prominent link to the Pearl murder video -- the first direct access provided by a U.S. news organization, in direct defiance of the wishes of Pearl's family.
In a way, I am precisely the individual Mindich had in mind. I never would have spent even three minutes burrowing through Google to find that video; the search would have seemed like a voyeuristic quest. The Phoenix's one-click link changed that. I justified viewing by telling myself that I am a reporter who writes about terrorism and violence and crime. I am a reporter and have a responsibility to witness atrocity, I said, even if it is through the video lens of its perpetrators.
But let's be honest. Of all the pundits who have weighed in for and against the Phoenix's posting, I have found not one who admitted searching the Internet for the Pearl video prior to Mindich's decision -- which I or any of us would have done if gaining some insight into Pearl's killing was our most important motivation. No, it's just that the Phoenix made it so easy to indulge tabloid, voyeuristic, ambulance-chasing bravado, my own included.
What is really at stake here? A few weeks ago, the FBI very nearly made the Pearl video a censorship issue by trying to convince Web site Prohosters.com to removing it from a customer's site. Prohosters properly refused. By the time the Phoenix posted its link to Prohosters, defending free speech was simply off the table. Nor could the Phoenix claim to be publishing some previously unavailable material. All publisher Mindich was doing was promoting the video, encouraging more widespread viewing of a sick and troubling document.
So was he justified? Reporters, photographers, editors and producers are continually making decisions about the outer limits of acceptable brutality. From the most anonymous crime scene to world-scale wars and disasters, the choice of what to show and not show is made in newsrooms every day. And it is a hard job, balancing the sensibilities of survivors, real news value and demands of editors clamoring for sensational front pages. I remember a photographer on one of my first newspaper jobs threatening to quit if the editor ran a particularly gruesome photo of a car wreck. David Handschuh of the New York Daily News says he will simply never print many of the pictures he shot of victims at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. These are questions not just of "taste" but profound judgment calls about whether explicit images really aid public understanding -- or simply cause private anguish for victims while brutalizing public sensibility.
