paper presented at the conference, ‘Mass Media in the Arab World and Beyond: Politics and Ethics’, organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Goethe-Institut, the Media Department at Bir Zeit University, and the Modern Media Institute at Al-Quds University, Ramallah, February 19-20, 2005; published in Arabic in Al-Ayyam newspaper, March 21, 2005.
One of the most famous photos in the world is one that only few people have ever seen. It is the last photo taken of Princess Diana alive. She was snapped as she lay dying in that car wreck in Paris in 1997. One of the paparazzi, who were chasing her car on motorbikes and in cars as it crashed, took the picture. It was sent to an agency immediately after the crash, but it was never published. Why? Mainly, it seems, because of the huge outpour of sympathy towards the princess and what I consider wise decisions to protect her dignity, even after her death, or perhaps especially after her death.
In comparison to Diana – after her death – there is not much protection of people’s dignity in today’s mass media, certainly not in the Arab and the Palestinian mass media. But not just there: during the last 25 years or so, red lines keep getting crossed in this regard all around the world.
Let us get back to the paparazzo. Did he do the right thing? Should he not have spoken to Diana words of comfort? Should he not have asked her what he could do for her? And if she was unable to speak, should he not have held back the other photographers to give her some peace and quiet? She had massive chest wounds and she was haemorrhaging. That these were the last moments of her life must have been obvious.
The categorical imperative of the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), demands that we should always act so that the rule according to which we are acting may be elevated to universal law. Jesus of Nazareth said: Do unto others what you would want them to do you. That is, according to Kant, another way of saying the same thing. Before Jesus, both the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chinese, including the philosopher Confucius, expressed the same idea in negative terms: Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you. Kant wrote that there are in fact infinitely many ways of formulating the categorical imperative. Another one is: Don’t treat people as means, as instruments, but always as goals in themselves.
Reality is seldom as clear-cut as moral philosophy. I believe it is possible that the photographer who took her last picture first treated Diana as a means for his own job and career, snapping what is really a kind of pornographic picture, and then – after second thoughts – held back other photographers and curious people to protect her and her dignity, treating her as a goal in herself.
But I also think we would all feel antipathy towards him if it turned out he just took the photo and then did not care about the woman, lying there in front of him, dying. I do not know, but I believe the vast majority of us would also suffer from some prickings of conscience had we acted in that way.
That is one of the reasons it is called the Golden Rule. It finds resonance among most people, perhaps even among all people. The ancient Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, a late ancient Palestinian, and an early modern East Prussian all made substantial philosophical contributions to the idea. It is perhaps the most global of all values.
But it is also a very demanding moral. We can all probably think of times when we have treated other people as means, as instruments. In fact, some of the paparazzi were charged on two counts, of pursuing the princess's car and involuntarily causing it to crash, and also of not helping her after the crash but concentrating on taking pictures. Both of those actions could be interpreted as callously treating people, in this case Diana and her fiancee, Dodi Fayed, who also died in the crash, as means, as instruments. In 1999, however, the charges against the photographers were dropped.
It would obviously be very hard to turn the categorical imperative into law. It is a duty. Journalists and people in general, however, probably prefer to consider their rights rather than their duties. Journalists have a basic right to freedom of expression, to press freedom. Duties, on the other hand, are restrictions of those rights, and restrictions come especially in the form of legislation.
Yet almost all media commentators agree on the necessity of the existence and observance of some kind of ethical code. And ethics can still play an important role in the media beyond legislation, for instance in self-regulation. That is where we find more references to ‘dignity’ than in media law. Media self-regulation is usually formulated as imperatives or duties and appears prominently in two forms, as an in-house ethics code for a particular media outlet, or as a media ethics code in a wider journalistic community, usually a country.
My second example comes from Al-Jazeera and from Palestine. It played a role in prompting Al-Jazeera to adopt an in-house ethics code last year. During the Rafah incursion last spring, a Palestinian cameraman was zooming in on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators who had been hit by Israeli tankfire. There were bodies on the ground and much blood. As the cameraman zoomed in on two particularly bloody bodies, he realized they were the bodies of his mother and his sister. The horror that he felt when he realized this is unimaginable to me. He was doing his job, catering to a kind of voyeurism among audiences, certainly to be blamed on the audiences, but also on the media that provide the goods. And the cameramen are part of the media. Again, the bodies on the ground were just means to him, that is, until he realized who they were.
My third example is also from Gaza. It aired on CNN, on 15 January this year. It showed Reuters footage from the aftermath of a clash between demonstrators and the Israeli army. Three or four men were swiftly carrying a wounded boy, apparently unconscious, possibly dying. The footage showed the group approaching from a distance, during perhaps five seconds. They ran right past the camera crew along a narrow road. And I asked myself, what if the camera crew had been standing a metre to the left? Then they would have slowed down the group and possibly endangered the boy’s life – unnecessarily. I believe ethical consciousness played a major role in making the cameramen position themselves so that they would not block the passage. Again it can be seen as an instance of the categorical imperative. If we were in that boy’s situation we would not have wanted camera crews to block our passage to an ambulance.
Perhaps the categorical imperative can be partially reformulated in a more attractive way for journalists. The German media theorist, Michael Kunczik, has said an international ethics of journalism must include an absolute duty to report human rights violations, regardless of the consequences. It would not solve all the complicated ethical problems that I have hinted at in my three examples, but it would at least solve the Gaza examples. It was, after all, right to film the consequences of the Israeli attacks. In the first instance, the Al Jazeera footage, the way in which the victims were filmed left room for improvement. Perhaps words alone would have done a better job. But all of these journalists were in fact doing their jobs well. In Diana’s case, it is much more questionable if the journalists were doing their job well. It could well be argued that they were acting immorally in a way or two.
To report human rights violations, regardless of consequences, is seldom mentioned in existing media ethics codes, but I think it belongs there, along with the usual negatives: not to be discriminatory against people with regard to sex, race, social class, religion, etc., not to take bribes, not to invade privacy, not to incite violence.
The most prominent duties in existing ethics codes are commonly to report the truth, in an objective, unbiased, balanced, and fair way. That is of course fine. It relieves the paparazzi of having a legal obligation to help Diana, among other things. Journalists are first and foremost observers. But we expect a little more from journalists. They cannot just be recording devices when it comes to reporting issues like human rights violations. They are human beings, too. We even expect them to risk their own lives, especially in conflict zones. So we must be cautious and not ask too much of journalists.
The minimum rights that journalists may demand, particularly in conflict zones, are: freedom of expression, freedom to live, freedom from torture, and freedom of movement. The last three were suggested by Peter Singer as minimum rights for anthropoid apes: gorillas, chimpanzees, orang-utans, etc. They were actually proposed as legal rights for anthropoids in the parliament of New Zealand. New Zealanders had been horrified by painful and lethal experiments on chimpanzees for research on HIV-AIDS, and eventually this kind of research was banned.
It is indeed very sad that journalists in Palestine may perhaps only demand or ask for the rights of chimpanzees, plus the freedom of expression, but it is perhaps something to remember in difficult situations. Especially the last right, freedom of movement, is denied Palestinian journalists habitually by the state of Israel, but so, of course, are all the other three. What I am trying to convey is that freedom of movement may be a partially forgotten right of journalists, partially also forgotten by the journalists themselves, because they are so used to being restricted in this regard – particularly in this region.
Journalists even have special rights to freedom of movement. In most European countries today, journalists can break into government offices, and even into private law firms, with impunity; that is if they can later prove that it was in the public interest. In Austria, the new conservative government recently tried to outlaw this special right. But the journalists fought back and won. They were able to argue that every single political scandal that has been exposed by the media during the last 30 years in Austria, has been exposed through the use of this impunity. If Palestine wants to call itself a democracy or a transparent and honest society, I suggest that journalists claim this right here, too.
Lastly, I would like to return to death and dignity with regard to Palestinian media, and how improvements could perhaps be made. During the last six months Miftah has been monitoring the Palestinian media for incitement to violence, bias, de-humanization, and de-legitimization of the other part in the conflict. Expecting de-humanization of Israelis, we were a little surprised to find many more cases of de-humanization of Palestinians by the Palestinian media.
My last example comes from the Palestinian newspaper, Al Ayyam (24 November, 2004). It is a photo depicting a girl after she was shot 20 times by Israeli soldiers while on her way to school in Gaza. The large colour photo was shown in the newspaper without any reporting on any of the aspects of the girl’s humanity: her interests, her wishes, her life. There was no indication that her family or friends had been contacted by the paper. In fact she is reduced to her corpse – to mere matter – in this article. It is perhaps an indirect kind of incitement to violence, at least to anger, but more importantly, it is de-humanization. And this trend, to de-humanize people, should in Miftah’s opinion be prevented, freedom of expression notwithstanding. Neither this girl – Iman al-Hams, 13 years old – nor any other victim deserves to be treated as an instrument or a means, neither during her life, nor after her death – in any case not so soon after her death.
