How Should News Organizations Handle Graphic Content in the Social Media Age?

This summer saw the on-camera slayings of two TV journalists in Virginia*, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, and the photo of a young Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, washed up dead on a Turkish beach.

This imagery added to an already bloated cache of relatively recent atrocities, from recorded beheadings at the hands of ISIS to police shootings caught on tape in the US. With so much violence spinning through our newsfeeds, it’s easy to feel as though media coverage of catastrophic events is only increasing. Suddenly, the world seems more gruesome.

Yet experts say this isn’t the case (citing, for example, the spread of unsettling images from World War II and the Civil Rights movement). In fact, many signs suggest the world is actually amore peaceful place. What has changed is technology.