Journalists, it’s time to show the bodies of mass shooting victims

One of us has seen dead bodies hundreds of times in her daily work. The other only at funerals and a few car accidents.

One of us works in a world where the privacy of individuals is paramount. The other in a world where public interest often supersedes privacy.

But we — two Temple University academic deans who are, by training, a trauma surgeon and a journalist — found ourselves in profound agreement recently after an event that touched us deeply, personally and professionally.

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Within a few hours of the news of yet another horrific mass shooting in America — this one the murder of 19 young children and two of their teachers in Uvalde, Texas — we came, independently, to the same conclusion about what needs to happen:

Show the bodies.

Put on display — in newspapers, on television, across the internet — a photograph or three that can, finally, help the American public understand exactly what happens when a weapon designed for modern warfare is unleashed on innocent, unarmed people. Like a 10-year-old at school.

Help them understand — through clear, verifiable images that no political spin can alter — that the damage from an AR-15 is dramatically more devastating than from a typical handgun, virtually liquefying human tissue and leaving a hole in the body the size of an orange.

Help them see, with their own eyes, why DNA identification was necessary to sort out which 10-year-old victim was which on the bloodied floor of the Uvalde classroom.

Help them understand, viscerally, that there is simply no reasonable argument that this is what our nation’s founders meant when they passed the Second Amendment.

For one of us, Amy Goldberg, who over three decades has operated on thousands of gunshot victims at Temple University Hospital, this is not a new notion. Five years ago, in an interview with HuffPost shortly after the assault-weapon slaughter of 49 people at Orlando, Fla.’s Pulse nightclub, she told a reporter that Americans needed to see the horrific physical reality of gun violence, without filters. “The country won’t be ready for it,” she said. “But that’s what needs to happen. That’s the only chance at all for this to ever be reversed.”

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In fact, she said then, the nation had missed its best opportunity to do that five years prior, in 2012, with the AR-15 murder of 20 schoolchildren and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. At the time, she thought: If public officials failed to care enough about the gunshot victims she saw in her Temple Hospital operating room — most of them Black, male adults — perhaps our nation’s institutional racism would move those officials to act when the victims were primarily white elementary school kids.

Sandy Hook, Amy thought, was a teachable moment: If the public had been shown autopsy photos of those children, the gun debate would have been transformed.

That, of course, did not happen. Instead, traditional journalistic methods — publishing portraits of the angelic 6-year-olds, airing their parents’ wailing cries as they buried their babies, interviewing mental health experts and “concerned” politicians — failed to produce reform.

And in the years since, we had San Bernardino, Calif. (14 killed by an AR-15), Orlando (49 dead), Sutherland Springs, Texas (26), Las Vegas (58), Parkland, Fla. (17), Pittsburgh (11), Buffalo, N.Y. (10), and dozens of other mass murders with that semiautomatic weapon. And on May 24 — approaching the 10-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, another unimaginably evil act happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

It is the unimaginable aspect that finally brought the other one of us, David Boardman, the journalist who became a journalism educator in 2013, to finally join his physician colleague in calling for a new approach to reporting these stories. In his days as a newspaper editor, he had often said no to publishing graphic photos, wanting to avoid retraumatizing surviving families and others. But this time, these circumstances, this culmination of a decade of doing nothing, led to a different conclusion.

“Couldn’t have imagined saying this years ago, but it’s time — with the permission of a surviving parent — to show what a slaughtered 7-year-old looks like,” he wrote on Twitter the day of the shooting. “Maybe only then will we find the courage for more than thoughts and prayers.”

Some of the early reaction to that tweet was critical, calling the notion insensitive and ghoulish. But in the days since, it has spurred much rich conversation among journalists, especially among the editors who, as David did for many years in Seattle, hold the keys to the gates of publication and broadcast.

In those conversations, journalists have reflected that some of the most catalytic moments in their profession have occurred with the publication of shocking, even revolting, photographs. In 1972, the Associated Press’ famed picture of a young naked girl screaming from the effects of napalm helped turn public sentiment against the Vietnam War. In 2004, CBS News and The New Yorker shared photographs of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq by American soldiers, shaming the nation and leading to military tribunals. And in 2020, Minneapolis teenager Darnella Frazier captured on video the stunning murder of George Floyd by a police officer, sparking protests and a nationwide reckoning on policing and race.

As David said in his tweet, we would expect editors to grant the Uvalde victims’ parents the ultimate choice of whether to share their tragedy with the world in this fashion. There is precedent, the most compelling being Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision in 1955 to invite Jet magazine to photograph her 14-year-old son Emmett in his open casket — his body mutilated by Mississippi Klansmen. She wanted the world to witness this cruelty, and her courage helped galvanize the civil rights movement.

It’s not lost on us, as two white Americans, that each of the examples we have cited here involved a victim of color, and that most of the Uvalde victims are Latino. And we are keenly aware that the disregard shown toward people of color in this country does not end with death. Perhaps, then, our prescription for publication should wait for the next time the victims of an AR-15 are not largely confined to one demographic group, but more broadly representative of the American tapestry. Sadly, we expect that will be soon.

For now, the word from Washington is that Congress may — may, mind you — pass a modest reform bill that would tighten background checks and incentivize states to pass “red flag” laws that make it harder for some people to purchase guns. But even one of the most vocal gun-reform advocates in Congress — Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who represents the survivors of Sandy Hook — concedes that AR-15s and other assault weapons will remain, legally, on our streets.

Congress, it appears, again lacks the courage and resolve to do what clearly needs to be done. These two deans are left to ask: Do journalists?

David Boardman is dean of the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University and former executive editor of the Seattle Times. He is also the founding chair of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which owns The Inquirer. Amy Goldberg is interim dean of Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine and surgeon-in-chief of the Temple University Health System.