Friday, December 31, 2004
AC: No Apology For Showing Graphic Pictures of the Tsunami Disaster
Thursday night in his "The Nth Degree" degree segment Anderson Cooper addressed the issue of many viewer complaints of CNN showing graphic pictures of the dead from the Tsunami disaster. Here's a portion of his comments:
A few of you have e-mailed us, not many, but a few, saying the pictures we've been showing you are too graphic. Now I understand the sentiment, but I hope you know that we don't want to show you these things.
None of us wants to see them. A parent silently screaming over the body of their lost infant. A child lost, searching for parents who may or may not be alive. Rows of bodies being cremated. No one wants to see this.
Yes, these images are terrible to look at, but look at them we should, because these bodies, these people are us. Death has defaced them. The water has done its worst, but in life they were like you or me, teachers and shopkeepers, students and parents, bakers and doctors. People struggling, as we all struggle.
And so very many of them died alone anonymously. They'll go uncelebrated, unremarked on, picked up by bulldozers, buried in pits. They will simply disappear.
And that is why we think, hard as it is, we must make ourselves look. Otherwise, for so very many, it will never -- it will be like they never existed at all.
# posted by ATN @ 1:12 AM 
