Too Graphic?

Valérie Payen-Jean Baptiste, a Haitian elementary school principal who lost every possession, her home and school, and nearly her family in the quake, was sickened by the images. “I’m tired of it; the photos are too much,” she says. “I know that [news outlets] took pictures, and that enabled people to raise money. But what I see is that people in Haiti are really upset. Some view the photos as an insult, a disaster, since we have already suffered so much.”

“I’m not criticizing journalists [who] talk about the facts of the earthquake,” she wrote in a follow-up e-mail. “But my critique is about the tone of unnecessary pictures and videos that show pieces of bodies, dying people, the nudity of people, or the misery/tragedy of people in line for food and water. Seriously, is this cruelty really necessary to mobilize massive humanitarian action?”

Read the full article by By Arielle Emmett on American Journalism Review