Awakening to the news that Muammar Gaddafi was “captured” was surreal but in the hours that followed things went well past surreal and stepped into outrageous rather quickly.
First there were the conflicting reports. Some were saying he was captured; some said he was killed. Some said he had only been injured, having been shot in the legs, while others had him dead instantly. The game-changer for the national news was when a cellphone photo emerged showing the dictator, at the very least, unconscious but we quickly found out he was certainly dead.
More than one network apologized for not being able to verify he was dead. The reporters seemed disappointed that they had to wait until NATO or the US confirmed Libya’s claims. So while they waited for the definitive word, they showed us the photo. Repeatedly. The photo is gruesome, showing Gaddafi blood-soaked and wounded, and before each time they showed it they warned viewers they would be showing a graphic photo in case you didn’t want to see it. But, really, there was no getting away from it. By early afternoon the photo was everywhere and you couldn’t avoid it if you wanted to.
Then the video was released and they didn’t have to show the photo any more because they had video of Gaddafi’s dead body being tossed around to show us over and over again. Twitter was ablaze with people questioning why we had to view all the graphic images and others celebrating those same images. It brought back the argument started after Usama bin Laden was killed: Do we need to see the dead body? I don’t think we do.
I don’t mourn Gaddafi one bit. The memory of the Lockerbie bombing will never leave me and the news of his death gave me a measure of peace. But there’s something unseemly about parading any dead body around and that’s what it felt like the media was doing with the photo and video of Gaddafi.
The world accepted that Usama bin Laden was dead without having to see the gory details. There’s no reason to think the same wouldn’t have been true of Gaddafi. Unfortunately, those in the media need to keep up with each other so if one network was going to show the images, they all were.
We have our proof that Gaddafi is dead and the visual of that has been ingrained in the minds of anyone who watched any amount of coverage. We not only got our pound of flesh but we now have it saved for posterity.