The Grim Task

Dear Readers:

A shy but faithful reader from Iowa asks Dr. Ink to consider what journalists should do when they encounter grisly details from a breaking story, such as the Columbia shuttle disaster. Given the destructive forces involved in the failed re-entry, it seems amazing to the Doc that any human remains would be found on the ground. But so they were.

Dr. Ink thinks that readers and viewers of news would be surprised to learn how restrained journalists are in their handling of such gruesome details. There were thousands of opportunities amid the World Trade Center rubble to portray the graphic consequences of terrorism. Doc remembers one image of a severed hand, and controversial images of bodies falling from the tops of the skyscrapers. But even these seemed stylized, horribly beautiful.

In the end, we are more likely to remember the feature obituaries in the New York Times and Newsday than the few corpses to which we were exposed — the lives and dreams of the lost, not their terrible remains.

This is how it should be. There are times, no doubt, when readers, viewers, or listeners must be forced to confront the unspeakable truth, as when Edward R. Murrow reported on the naked bodies stacked like cordwood within the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

The condition of the astronauts’ remains falls into a different category. Respect and restraint were, and should have been, the order of the day.

There is one cliché of disaster reporting, however, that Dr. Ink cannot abide. It is when we hear that the coroner or medical examiner is about to perform his or her “grim task.” What might very well be grim to the reporter or the audience, may not be so grim to the professional seasoned in the task.

This insight goes back at least to Shakespeare, when Hamlet and Horatio come upon the singing gravedigger.

Hamlet: Has this fellow no feeling of his business? He sings in grave-making.

Horatio: Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.

Hamlet: ‘Tis e’en so, the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.

Doc remembers a news staff that decorated a Christmas tree with nothing but the grim and graphic photos they kept out of the paper. Not exactly a “daintier sense,” but a sign of restraint nonetheless, a sign of journalists’ invisible virtue.