DATE: Sunday, May 25, 1997                  TAG: 9705230013

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM

                                            LENGTH:   94 lines

REPORT TO READERS VIOLENCE IN ZAIRE: TOO GORY TO SHOW?

Monday's front page had a stark message of rebel ``justice'' - a sequence of four photos showing a man in Zaire's capital being pushed at gunpoint out of Camp Mobutu, then being shot to death in the street.

There was no letup on Tuesday. In another front-page photo, a rebel soldier was shown with his foot on the head of a prone prisoner, his rifle in the man's side, a crowd looking on with curiosity.

Nearly a dozen Pilot readers objected to one or the other of these pages, or both. ``Appalling,'' ``disgusting,'' ``distressing,'' ``sickening'' were some of the adjectives applied to portraying an execution on the front page of a newspaper.

``On TV, I could shut it off,'' said Ruth Daugherty of Norfolk. ``How can you shut off your paper?''

Daugherty felt The Pilot could have gotten its point across by just running the photo of the execution victim being marched along at gunpoint. The Pilot's sister newspaper, the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record, did just that, along with a powerful eye-witness account, ``No judge, no jury - just bullets.''

That same single photo ran inside The Washington Post. None of the other half-dozen newspapers that we get in our office - including The New York Times, Richmond Times-Dispatch and the (Newport News) Daily Press - showed the actual execution.

That doesn't make them right and us wrong. But why run such stark photos? Denis Finley, The Pilot's night news editor, wasn't involved in the photo selection but thinks it was the right decision.

What's going on in Zaire/Congo is a revolution, he said, ``and revolutions are usually not peaceful. (Rebel leader Laurent) Kabila's march to Kinshasa seemed orderly and peaceful, but it was not. There was fighting all the way and many on both sides spilled blood.

``The photos that we ran depicted a truth about the revolution that was not clear every day; that there was violence and human beings died over this struggle.''

And then there is the fact that Hampton Roads is a Navy community - and that the United States stationed a ship, the Kearsarge, off the coast of West Africa because of the upheaval in Zaire.

``There are American citizens there,'' said Finley. ``The photos help raise public consciousness about the dangers inherent in our sending American troops into this country if it should come to that. Remember Somalia?''

Reader Daugherty remembered Somalia - specifically, the photo taken in October 1993 showing the body of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. And she didn't think that photo should have run, either.

Counterpoint Finley: ``Some news events outweigh our sensitivity to the reader,'' he said. ``It's not often that we would run such graphic photographs. . . . But the compelling nature of the event, and the way the photos crystallized the violent side of the Zaire story, transcended the discomfort that we knew we would give to some readers.''

As both a journalist and a reader, I want to know what's going on in the world, even if the image is unpleasant. But it doesn't always take dead bodies to give us the real picture. The photo of a man walking to his execution is almost more terrible than the actual shooting. And the picture of a soldier stomping on a prisoner tells its own story of brutality and repression.

Perhaps those two photos alone told the tale.

TOROS Y TERRORISMO. ``Newspapers have a moral obligation to print images of violence. . . It is better to know than not to know.''

Those words were spoken at a recent ombudsmen's meeting in Barcelona and they seem prophetic, considering the images of violence coming out of Zaire this week. The speaker was Carlos Perez de Rozas, a photojournalist and deputy editor at the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia.

Perez de Rozas showed his audience of public editors a series of grotesque newspaper photos, including the disembodied head of a soldier and bloody scenes of terrorism in Ireland and Tel Aviv.

``People have a right to see these,'' he said, ``to form an opinion.''

Interestingly, he noted that none of the British newspapers showed actual scenes of violence when a classroom full of children was slaughtered last year in Dunblane, Scotland. Instead, almost all of the papers - from the serious dailies to the crassest tabloids - ran a posed photo of the class with its teacher. In its own way, that image - a class of young, innocent children - evoked as much horror as any scene of carnage.

But Perez de Rozas' zeal for showing reality has its limits. He was furious that many Spanish newspapers had run photos of the naked body of a woman who had jumped, or fallen, off a Barcelona building.

La Vanguardia and the two other Barcelona newspapers had opted to give the victim her privacy and dignity; their photos showed the body covered by a blanket.

Naturally, a single death, unrelated to war or terrorism, brings out the need to protect the victim. But to me it also suggested that, as in the Dunblane case, what's left to our imagination can sometimes be more effective than the reality of blood and guts and beheaded soldiers.

On the front page of La Vanguardia, you could see the woman, only her foot not covered by the blanket, lying amid concrete rubble - paramedics in the foreground, shadowy bystanders behind a police tape. The tragedy of a life lost.

But I think that Perez de Rozas would add that there are times when we need to see the message of warfare and brutality splashed right in front of us, bright red with blood. It isn't pleasant. But it's reality.

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