A small family lies dead on a street in Ukraine. Killed trying to flee from Russian shells. At the beginning of March the New York Times published this picture on their front page – and thus triggered a debate worldwide: Which pictures should – or may the media show? How to report on the war? The German Press Council has just called for the selection of such photos to be “careful”. Before publication, “weigh up the readers’ interest in information and the interests of the victims and their relatives.”
“We have to be aware that in ethics there is no legislator who prohibits or allows anything, we are the only legislators ourselves,” says Claudia Paganini, professor of media ethics at the Munich School of Philosophy. First and foremost it is about the “personal rights of the victims”. There are also many other objective perspectives “that also show the destructiveness and brutality of the war”. Journalism should not “slip into activism”. If you look at the iconographic images of the 20th and 21st centuries, she notices that they were often “not necessarily brutal or spectacular images”. For example, 9/11 brings to mind the image of firefighters raising a flag at Ground Zero. It has less to do with the images themselves than with the emotions within society.
Related news: Von der Leyen and Borrell travel to Kyiv, criticism of the isolation requirement case, Greece pays off debt.
You can find the most important questions and answers on the third and final part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report here.
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