Why we didn’t need to see images of Gauri Lankesh’s dead body

The photo spoke of fragility & defeat, instead of the courage she had come to embody.

WrittenBy:Deepanjana Pal
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Last night, when the news first broke that journalist Gauri Lankesh had been killed, some details were unclear. Had she opened the door to her killers? Were the men masked? Was her body found at the gate or on her veranda? Important as they are to the criminal investigation, the most critical detail was in sharp, terrible focus: a dissenting journalist had been shot at point blank range, in a perfectly respectable part of Bengaluru, and had died.

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Lankesh had come home after work at approximately 8pm last night. When she got out of her car to open the gate to her house, a group of men (two) rode up on a two-wheeler (either bike or scooter). One man had been waiting for her outside her house. They shot her and drove away. The incident was reported by someone who lives in the apartment building opposite Lankesh’s house. When the police arrived, they found four empty cartridges near Lankesh’s dead body, which lay with limbs arranged in the ungainly geometry by sudden death and rigor mortis. Lankesh was 55.

Within an hour, photographs of Lankesh’s body were circulating on social media and news channels. Most of the mainstream media did Lankesh the courtesy of blurring her torso, which left only her awkwardly-splayed legs and chappal-clad feet in definition. Few on social media and television news bothered with that fig leaf. Especially if you’re among those who consume most of their news online, chances are that the image of Lankesh that will be seared into your memory isn’t one of her arguing against Hindutva and communalism or championing dissent, but of her lying on the ground, a slight figure lit only partly by the camera’s flash while the rest of her is consumed by darkness; her arm still held against the part of her torso that took the fatal hit that she hadn’t anticipated.

When the Indian news media chose to show photographs of Lankesh’s dead body, what we got was an image that spoke of fragility and defeat. It was Lankesh at her most vulnerable. If you knew Lankesh or had seen her arguing her point of view, her dead body was in shocking contrast to the wiry grit that she embodied in life. Whether or not you were familiar with Lankesh, the photograph taken at the scene of the crime told you to be afraid. It spoke to you of unsafety. It reminded you that despite strict gun laws on paper, it’s possible for men to ride up and shoot you point blank. If you knew the battles Lankesh had been fighting, you got the message that if you choose to dissent, you should remember that the gun is mightier than the pen.

While we will know better if the investigation into Lankesh’s murder finds the killers, the way she was murdered suggests that speaking out can have terrible consequences. Showing the image of Lankesh’s dead body helped spread that message. It was shocking enough to read how she’d been killed, but the words allow us to indulge in one imaginary moment when Lankesh realises that the bang is the report of a gun and she squares her jaw in resistance. The photographs go past that moment and impress upon us that she’s been felled. They cultivate fear.

When sections of the Indian media chose to carry photographs of Lankesh’s dead body, wittingly or unwittingly it helped spread the message of intimidation that the killers had wanted to send out.

How the dead should be covered by the media is an ethical issue that journalists have struggled with for centuries now. Today, when news feeds a culture of rapid and rabid consumption, the question is more urgent than ever before. There is an audience that’s hungry for information and increasingly used to an almost voyeuristic level of access into the lives of others. With countless media outlets fiercely competing with one another to retain viewers with shrinking attention spans, the image becomes a key weapon in the media arsenal. And so the visuals that accompany our news are rich with violence — blood stains, mutilated bodies, the grainy CCTV images that play that decisively violent moment of death on an endless loop. As a character says in Nightcrawler, a chilling film about the business of crime journalism, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

The argument is that the audience needs to know, but usually, it doesn’t need to see in order to know. Seeing violence hasn’t made us more empathetic or aware. If anything, it seems to numb our already apathetic society. And so to provoke a reaction, the bar must be raised each time. The image has to be a little more graphic; the crime, a little gorier; and the instinct, a little less human.

When it comes to visuals of the dead, the media is expected to answer one question when deciding whether or not to use it: does the audience need to see the dead body in order to comprehend the circumstances of the death? Victims of violence are usually depicted with photos from when they were alive because death is not only disturbing, it’s also undignified in how it reduces a body to a corpse. There are rare occasions when visuals have managed to restore dignity to victims and created ripples of awareness, like with the photograph of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s washed-up body. Most of the time, however, photographs are used unthinkingly, to simply feed bloody scraps to the beast that is the audience.

Yet the visual is one of the most powerful storytelling tools we have. Every image — the way it’s been composed, the details it chooses to obscure and the ones it highlights — tells a story. It has the potential to make an emotional impact, especially if used with intelligent text. But that’s not all. The way a chosen image is used by the media determines how a bigger, socio-political tale is articulated and disseminated.

How people act on social media is impossible to control, but for the media to take its cues from individual acts of irresponsibility — which the Indian media does regularly — is both appalling and worrying. Just because photos of Lankesh’s body were floating around Twitter and Facebook is no reason for them to appear on the news. The reason this discretion is advised is not because journalism is higher on some vague totem pole of relevance, but for its greater reach and the fact that the news media is in the business of framing narratives. What distinguishes journalism from regular social media is that it does more than inform you of facts and breaking news — it tells you how to read the facts that are coming to light.

This is why it’s worth analysing who are the guests invited to sit on television debate panels and what are the opinions that they’re allowed to espouse without contest. These decisions may not always be dictated by ideology. Often, it comes down to logistics of who is available and who can shout more, but there are editorial decisions being made in both the choice and the execution of a debate. If these are made in an unthinking, knee-jerk fashion, that is as disappointing as the notion of news that is crafted with studied subtlety to ensure a particular ideological bias.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @dpanjana.

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