Amateur footage can bring mixed blessings

THE eerie footage captured deep underground by a Tube passenger with a mobile phone has already become one of the more enduring images of the London bombings.

Stunned survivors moved almost like sleepwalkers, stalked by smoke and shadows and bathed in a ghostly green light as they made their way towards fresh air and the distant exit.

Although the footage, taken by actress Liza Pulman on a camera phone with video capacity, was short in duration and of limited quality, it portrayed the surreality of the aftermath of disaster more vividly than professional camera crews arriving to film after the event.

The ready availability of amateur recording equipment in the pockets and handbags of ordinary people brings both blessings and dilemmas for news organisations.

Even with the growth of 24-hour news channels, 'eye in the sky' helicopters and highly mobile outside broadcast units, no media group can hope to have a camera in the right place at the right time all the time when earth-shattering news happens.

If people in the middle of the action survivors, witnesses, helpers have the presence of mind to capture the scene, it can become an invaluable record of the events and their impact. When broadcast to a countrywide, or even worldwide, audience by a news organisation, it can really bring viewers to the heart of the story.

But footage taken at ground zero of an accident or atrocity can also be far more graphic than that captured by a camera crew or photographer kept at a distance by a police cordon.

The temptation for broadcasters and newspapers to use such pictures is growing. There is an argument that if the pictures are out there in the public anyway, then news organisations could be accused of presenting an incomplete or sanitised version of events by failing to show them.

There is also pressure on media professionals to kick against their self-censoring habits and bend company guidelines on taste and sensitivity to capture more graphic images.

Some of that pressure comes from the burgeoning news industry in the Yet viewers watching RTÉ's coverage of the London bombings will have heard news presenters remark that many of the images were too gruesome to broadcast and RTÉ's head of television news, Cillian de Paor, is adamant that caution will remain policy when it comes to selecting pictures for public consumption.

"This is an issue for our news teams all the time, the foreign desk especially, and particularly in recent times with car bombings in Baghdad. It's an issue for us in terms of our own people. If you are sitting on the foreign desk examining incoming material, you can see a lot of really graphic stuff.

"We have been onto the EBU (the European Broadcasting Union which collects and disseminates international film for public broadcasters) about this and have asked them not to send us the really gruesome stuff because we don't want our staff watching it and there is no way it is ever going to make to the television screens."

Deciding what constitutes unacceptable material can be subjective but there are basic guidelines.

"We do not show people being killed, for example," says de Paor. "Sometimes you have to show some material to illustrate the gravity of the situation but we have a policy of not showing gratuitously gruesome material.

"We don't put out unpleasant material unless it is vital to the story. We would be even more sensitive about what goes out early in the day and at teatime."

The BBC are similarly, if not more, sensitive about the selection of footage for broadcast. Just last month, the organisation, after reviewing its coverage of the Beslan school siege, announced its intention to use time delays on live broadcasts from disaster scenes so that producers can block out distressing and upsetting images.

Mr de Paor says RTÉ will not be swayed by the availability of ever-more graphic images or alternative amateur means of dissemination such as mobile phones and websites.

"With the videophone images from the underground, they showed people trying to get out and panic in a carriage. It was interesting and I would have been happy with that going out. But if it showed severed limbs no.

"It's one thing this material being made available and another thing us putting it out to a wide audience. I don't see RTÉ News getting ourselves into a downward spiral of competing on atrocity pictures."