Rieder: How to handle the beheading images?

Even for the New York Post, this was pretty shocking.

Dominating the cover of its print edition Wednesday, accompanied by the headline SAVAGES, was a truly disturbing picture of freelance photojournalist James Wright Foley just before his beheading, with his executioner's knife at his throat.

But as unsettling as that was it was nothing compared with the video of Foley's beheading posted by the radical Islamic State on a jihadist site as well as on YouTube and the graphic images that were distributed via Twitter.

The horrific visuals quickly triggered an outraged response. The hashtag #IsisMediaBlackout urging people not give the Islamic State terrorists the attention they so badly wanted took off rapidly. YouTube took down the video. On Wednesday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced that the accounts of those sharing the ugly images would be frozen.

"Though some will decry what YouTube and Twitter have done as censorship, it is no different than a news director or Web editor deciding that something is in poor taste and declining to air or publish it," Quinnipiac University Journalism Chair Kevin Convey said. "When the poster is a terrorist group such as ISIS trying to gain propaganda value from the slaughter of a journalist, the decision becomes even easier."

The revulsion at the barbaric images seemed ubiquitous. There seemed to be wide agreement that making the images available would both dishonor the memory of James Foley and play into the hands of the Islamic State radicals by doing what they wanted.

Perfectly understandable sentiments. But the situation is a little more complex.

Grisly images have long been a source of major tension in journalism. Journalists' duty is to tell the truth, to inform. That often means passing along information — and images — that are profoundly disturbing.

But how grisly is too grisly? How much is too much? When do sensitivity and taste outweigh the need to know?

Anyone who has spent time in a newsroom recalls numerous debates on the subject.

Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, fears that in the effort to bury the hideous video, the pendulum may be swinging too far. McBride hardly advocates running all four minutes and 40 seconds of the snuff video on television. But she believes having it available under the right conditions is a positive thing.

"Anytime you tell people you can't have it, that information becomes more powerful," she says. "You play into the hands" of the people who want it disseminated. And in the current case, "demonstrating the barbaric nature of that organization has democratic value. There is a value in documenting and distributing with accurate context a heinous act."

Trying too hard to protect the reader and viewer can sugarcoat reality, in her view. And it can reflect a "patronizing" attitude toward the news consumer.

Recently, McBride, Poynter's vice president for academic programs, was looking through an old copy of Life magazine that included a big spread with "gruesome" photos of Americans slaughtered by Germans during World War II. In one picture, the face of the victim was obscured. "They were documenting horror, and doing it in such a way that the audience won't turn away," she says.

Similarly, when American Nick Berg was executed in Iraq in 2004, some outlets offered an edited version of the video without the most horrific parts.

In the case of James Wright Foley, McBride argues for showing the video in a limited context (in a protected venue where it's only accessible to adults, for example), with people being clearly warned about what they are about to see and provided with additional information about the Islamic State.

"I'm uncomfortable with total blackouts," she says. "They're bad for democracy."

McBride says that there are a lot of people who favor sharing the images "because they are appalled and want to pressure the powers-that-be to bomb the crap out of" the Islamic State. "It's not democratically appropriate to silence those voices."