Press Council approves complaint against Blick am Abend
The Swiss Press Council has upheld a complaint against *Blick am Abend*. The newspaper published a photo of a workplace accident showing ten deceased individuals, some of whom were partially recognizable, on its «Pictures of the Day» double-page spread.
This violated the human dignity of the deceased, says the Press Council. The photo published in January 2011 showed an accident in the Philippine capital Manila in which ten construction workers lost their lives because an elevator collapsed. The almost page-high picture shows several dead bodies with partly dislocated limbs, scattered blood and rather indistinctly some faces of the victims.
A reader complained to the Press Council that the picture violated the human dignity of the victims. Blick am Abend replied that the picture was sensitive, but that human dignity was not violated simply because individual victims of an accident in a distant country were recognizable.
In its statement published on Tuesday, the Press Council came to the opposite conclusion. The picture has no informational value for the reader beyond the fact that ten workers lost their lives in an accident in Manila. If a photo of corpses is selected solely because of the expressive arrangement of the dead bodies and printed without explanation of the closer circumstances of the accident, the editorial office abuses these unknown accident victims as a surprising pure shock stimulus and thus violates their human dignity. (sda)
