What does an editor do if he doesn’t have anything to say, no ads to pad his paper with, or reporters to go out and get worthy stories to print? Plaster a picture of a poor soul who has lost all hope and hanged himself! [pdf]
Why? Why go down to this level? Is human misery now so cheap that even such a horrible death as this merits a gruesome picture in the newspaper? What happened to self-regulation? What happened to just simple human empathy and good sense, what happened to just simple human decency?
Al-Wasat clearly doesn’t subscribe to any of these principals. What they did by printing this picture is criminal and they should be punished for it.
Write to the editor and express your feelings to him. Letters in English are fine.
Comments
Mr Al-Jamri’s perspective
Sickening – is this what Mansour Al-Jamri meant in his essay “Human Rights: An Islamist perspective”?
http://www.islam21.net/pages/keyissues/key4-1.htm
Re: Mr Al-Jamri’s perspective
Probably not. I agree with what he says in his essay, after all he’s trying to reconcile the fact that human rights is more philosophical than religious and even if the concepts of human rights are taken religiously you will find that they equate generally to philosophical concepts.
Here he emphasises that the Islam is indeed how you interact with other human beings rather than just maintaining the 5 pillars of Islam.
In the context of my post, as an editor he is responsible for what is published in his paper (unlike comments entered on any website as the webmaster cannot be responsible for them, such is the nature of a dynamic medium like the internet, a paper physically has to be printed and before it goes to the presses, the editor must authorise it), hence he should not have allowed such a picture to appear.
A textual report would have sufficed, as is done almost daily with these incidents in Bahrain. Having a picture glaring at you like that I think is disgusting.
Al-Wasat Newspaper goes way downhill
I think that they posted such picture purily based on commercial reasons. Appearantly, they think that such pictures would attract more people to buy their newspaper taking a tabloid approach in reporting just like some of the newspapers in the UK (profit based on reporting unusual and disturbing incidents that interests a major porportion of the people of bahrain). It reflects how allot of bahrainis look at asians and indians in particular as less human than us as if we have somesort of a feather on top of our heads that makes us better people. I don’t think that they would one day publish a picture of a dead bahraini in a car accident for example. It is a clear and obvious infringment of human rights which is ironic especialy that this came from perhaps the only national newspaper that promotes these rights.
Yousif xx
Re: Al-Wasat Newspaper goes way downhill
You’re probably right Yousif, Arabs generally look down upon people from the sub-continent, Northern Arabs (from the Levant countries) look down upon Gulf Arabs, and the whole world looks down upon Asia as a whole.. the cycle continues.
But as you said, human rights are universal, the same blood flows through every human being’s veins, and every human being should be respected. Publishing a horrific picture such as this, pictures of people being humiliated, pictures of prisoners, pictures of war casualties, pictures of terror victims and the like debase the very essence of human beings.
I’m not naive to believe that this will stop. Every side of a story wants to show the world that they are right and look how bad the other side is by showing pictures of dead and mutilated people. Journalists will also say that they have to show such pictures in the hope that those will shock people into action.
I find the whole thing disgusting.