TV News Should Show Video Of Paris Terrorist Getting Killed By Cops

On Friday, the news was rightly dominated by the dual standoffs between French police and terrorists involved in the murders of 13 people earlier in the week, standoffs which ended in violent death for three of the suspects, while one remains at large. Two of the suspects, brothers Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34, were killed by police at a warehouse in Dammartin-en-Goële, while 32 year-old Amedy Coulibaly ended his siege of a Paris kosher grocery by killing four of the hostages, before being killed by police in a hail of gunfire. Coulibaly’s girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddienne, remains at large, and is suspected in the killing of a female police officer last week. There has even been speculation that Boumeddiene may have been present during the Paris standoff, and escaped with the hostages during the confusion of the raid.

One of the big issues to arise in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre was the refusal of some outlets to run images of the cartoons that offended the terrorists who carried out the attack (a cohort which did not include this site, or this author). Some made excuses about the offensiveness of the images from a standards perspective, as if they were being asked to show pictures of a cock. Given the newsworthiness of the cartoons, and the threatening context around them, this could easily have been dealt with by informing viewers that they were about to see a cock, mainly so that no one else would be killed for showing cock, but also because the cock is news, even if it’s offensive.

There are a hundred other ways news outlets could have worked around the sensibilities of their audiences, but at least that bit of self-censorship made some kind of sense, either as a practical matter of self-preservation or genuine sensitivity.

What I have a really hard time understanding is how TV news covered the raid that killed Coulibaly, and which was caught on video. Here’s a little sample:

Now, the first argument is probably going to be that the video of this murdering scumbag getting killed is too “disturbing” or “upsetting” for viewers, except the thing opens with a shot of an innocent, dead hostage in plain view. So, what, we have to blur Mohammad’s taint, but fresh terror victims’ corpses are fair game?

The other possibility, the one I assumed to be the case after seeing these reports, is that the footage was just too graphic. Several days later, I saw the uncut footage when someone sent me a link to this video, without warning, but consider yourself warned: it is explicit…READ MORE

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