January 09, 2007	Tuesday	Zilhaj 18, 1427

LONDON: More than 200 readers contacted the Guardian to express something very close to unanimity in their condemnation of the front page of the paper that greeted them on new year’s day. This carried across the full width of the page a picture with the caption: “Saddam Hussein hanging from a noose after execution in Baghdad early on Saturday, in a photograph seemingly taken by camera phone and obtained from an Arab-language website.”

Barely detectable amid the cries of dismay and condemnation, there was the very faint sound of approval. A reader, not quite alone, wrote: “When you review your decision to publish that terrible image on the front page will you bear in mind that the photographer performed an act of journalism which the US and British authorities would have preferred censored? I recall your front-page photograph of a hanging Bosnian woman who had quietly committed suicide in the corner of a field, another image which brought home the true horror of events instead of a sanitised version the authorities would prefer us to believe. I applaud your bravery.”

Another reader saw it rather differently: “The photograph of the woman who had hanged herself shocked me, but I thought the Guardian was right to have printed it. The photograph today of Saddam Hussein with the noose around his neck also shocked me and I think it should not have been printed. At the moment I cannot rationalise these contrasting feelings.” A Guardian journalist suggested a significant difference. The picture of the woman, he felt, conveyed a sense of “the universal victim” - “You didn’t have to know who she was to feel the awful pitiless waste of war. In the Saddam case, it looks as though we are part of victor’s justice, mob justice too, in gloating over the dead tyrant.”

A reader who was confronted by the image on Guardian Unlimited wrote to say, “At first I thought it wrong of your paper to publish the photograph ... and I still find the picture offensive. But the image is provocative and points a finger directly at the west, reminding us of our own responsibility for the country that Iraq was and has become now. On reflection I have changed my mind.”

Some readers accused the paper of being complicit in “pornographic ghoulishness”, of promoting “snuff pornography”, and of making “an inexcusable error of judgment”. The tone was of disappointment, even betrayal, that, as one reader put it, “‘my’ paper, which I trusted, would print these pictures”.

I raised the issue at the editor’s morning conference on Jan 2. Since then I have spoken to all those who took part in a discussion before publication. I have polled all Guardian and Guardian Unlimited journalists asking them two questions: was it right to use the picture?; was it right to use it on the front page?

Journalists were divided almost equally, with a slight overall majority believing that it was wrong to use it and most of those answering “no” to both questions. Their views closely reflected the objections raised by readers. Of the journalists who supported the decision to use the picture, one said, “If there will be an iconic symbol of the war, this — not Abu Ghraib or the felled statue (of Saddam Hussein) — is it. The war was waged, ostensibly, to implant democratic norms. Yet this execution harked back to an extinct era ... Surely that is the point: a war waged to bring an under-developed society into the ‘modern’ age has done the reverse and thrust Iraq into a chaos that more closely resembles medieval barbarism. The photograph symbolically portrays that ghastly irony in a way nothing else could.”

The duty editor on the day was the deputy editor of the Guardian. The editor of the Guardian was consulted. The deputy editor said, “We had seen the controlled, manipulated and sanitised version of the event put out by the Iraqi government. This was the version they did not want us to see. Of course I regret that so many people were offended by it, but the decision to use it was finally taken only after we had seen the whole sequence and heard the audio. The picture in my view was umbilically linked to the story and we could not walk away from that.” The editor agreed with that. He said, “It is a shocking image of a repellent act and we have used it unflinchingly. I believe you have a duty to show such repellent acts, especially when your government is involved in the process by which they came about. This event had been mischaracterised on the first day. If you look at the video, which I did before we published this picture, then you have an entirely different impression.”

In a letter that he has written to all those who complained, he says: “A newspaper which retreats from reporting the crueller realities of the world is, in an important sense, retreating from its duty of bearing witness.”

The reasons for using the picture were considered to be powerful enough to overwhelm possible objections. Clearly they did not do that. For many readers the reasons for running the picture were far from self-evident. The leader that day might have borne a closer relationship to the treatment of the front page and spelled out the reasons why it was considered necessary to use the picture. It said, among other things: “It bears repeating that the death penalty remains a cruel and unusual punishment.” To many readers these sentiments seemed at odds with those they inferred from the front page.

I have argued before that in predictably controversial circumstances the time to take readers into your confidence with an editorial note is at the time of presentation rather than after. That, I believe, is what the Guardian should have done on this occasion.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service