Albert Oetgen, senior producer of the NBC Nightly News, hasn’t yet seen Thursday evening’s coverage of the attacks in Falluja, but he seems confident the crew back home did a good job. He lists off the names of executive producers, associate editors, and others at the station whom he describes as rigorous about screening the content of each broadcast. His trust in his colleagues is clear. Caution and high standards are “built into the culture,” he says. (It helped his confidence some, I imagine, to have called the station yesterday evening for a play-by-play of last night’s show.)
With video feeds like the ones that came out of Falluja, Oetgen said, his team has to strike for a balance between the two values of journalistic purpose and taste. But, as Poynter’s Bob Steele would be the first to tell you, ethical decision-making is not always a matter of either/or.
Stories have four elements, Oetgen said — video, natural sound, sound from interviews, and the reporter’s vocal track. To tell a story as difficult as this, the team relies on each element to overcome the limitations of the others. Where, for example, video of a corpse being dragged along the ground may be too explicit for some audiences, the reporter may describe what’s happening in the scene. The video, meanwhile, could withhold some of the grislier elements of the scene.
“We showed pictures of a crowd of people,” Oetgen said, “and you could see the people with ropes pulling something along. The words very clearly described what was going on. And we showed a trail of blood.”
“Once you’ve made the decision that your journalistic purpose is going to be served by showing the pictures,” he said, “then the question becomes, ‘How do we tastefully do that — convey what we’re trying to convey, and still bring an accurate picture of what happened?’ … That is a sliding scale every time.”
Some other editorial options Oetgen prefers not to take. He prefers not to blur videos, for example. “I can see situations in which it’s necessary to do that, but … when you blur, you raise questions you may not need to raise if you think more carefully about other options that you have.”
And placing a smaller over-the-shoulder image of the violence onscreen is a weak choice as well, he said. “I don’t think that there’s a difference (in) showing a small image of a picture that you’re not going to show a big image of.”
Every day, at 6:30, millions of households allow Oetgen and his crew to intrude on their lives for a little while, and he stewards that privilege carefully. “It only takes one news organization with a national scope,” he said, “to make one mistake or one bad call for people — for a lot of people — to have a bad opinion of what we do.”
