Hallowe'en horror" screamed the front page of the Sunday World last weekend, above a picture of a body dangling on a rope from a flyover on the Bangor dual carriageway. In the republic, the graphic image was relegated to page 7, though if it had happened in Dublin it would probably have been on the front.
It was such a shocking image that some newsagents in Northern Ireland turned the paper over and warned people that they might be shocked. That did not hurt circulation. It was only later that day that the backlash started. Malachy Toman, of Public Initiative for the Prevention of Suicide, condemned the decision to publish as "absolutely disgusting" and said that the image had brought back memories of his own son, who had also hanged himself.
Matt Baggott, the PSNI chief constable, and Sinn Fein's John O'Dowd joined the condemnation. "Crass and senseless", said O'Dowd, one of 70 people to make a complaint to the UK's Press Complaints Commission (PCC).
Baggott said: "I believe our watchwords, both in the media and as the police service, should be compassion and kindness and I would not support the publication of photographs of that distressing nature."
Am I the only one who found these comments priggish and self-serving? The last time I remember the publication of images of corpses being an issue in Northern Ireland was when the bodies of IRA victims were dumped at the side of country roads. They were reproduced in republican publications and the mainstream press. Did O'Dowd not remember that as he claimed the moral high ground?
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Baggott is a deeply religious man, a born-again Christian and president of the Christian Police Association. If the opportunity to judge the press in moral terms was hard to resist, he might have remembered the biblical injunction: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged."
The piece in the northern edition of the Sunday World continued: "Anger as cops leave hanged man's body on show for three hours". The police later confirmed that the body was left hanging from the flyover for more than four hours. It had first been spotted by an off-duty officer at 8am, but may have been there longer, and was not removed until close to 1pm.
It is arguable that the police's apparent tardiness could have been illustrated by the Sunday World without publishing this picture. I am inclined to think that it could, but the image of cars driving past said more than any words could have done. It is only fair to note that shortly after the picture was taken, the traffic was stopped by the police. But the body was still clearly visible from nearby houses and a busy supermarket car park. Police have screens for use in public-order situations such as contested marches, but they did not use them on this occasion.
The victim's hands were secured behind his back and there was blood on his shirt. The police initially suspected that he had been murdered. That, they say, is why the body was not cut down straight away; it was left to hang so as not to disturb a possible crime scene. A tarpaulin or screens were not used for the same reason. Is that really the best procedure in such cases?
A retired senior detective, who acts as a policing consultant abroad, thinks not. He says that the first priority should be to determine whether the man could be revived, and that would require the presence of a doctor. If death was certain, for instance if rigor mortis had set in, the body should have been cut down and taken away for forensic examination. "I can't see the logic of leaving it hanging exposed to the elements," he said. "It would be preferable to cut it down, with the ligature still around the neck, and take it away for forensic examination indoors."
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So the Sunday World had a point, which Baggott did not address fully when he attacked the newspaper for its lack of compassion. It would be interesting to hear the views of the police ombudsman and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary on the procedures used by the police.
There remains the matter of taste, which is ultimately subjective. In the past, when The Irish Times printed a picture of a gangland murder victim, the newspaper defended itself on the basis that it was alerting the public to the reality of Dublin's criminal underworld. But publication still met with an adverse reaction: the public judged that the paper had failed the taste test and it changed its policy.
However, taste is not a universal standard. In 1978, after the IRA fire-bombed the La Mon House hotel near Belfast, the police printed a poster showing the charred body of one of the 12 dead and displayed it across the province. Like The Irish Times, they argued that there was a public interest in revealing the full horror of the atrocity. It worked for the RUC but not for The Irish Times. It did not work for the Sunday World when it argued that the graphic image might discourage people from hanging themselves.
A related issue arose in 2003 when coalition forces killed Saddam Hussein's two sons, Qusay and Uday, and put their pictures on show to prove they were dead.
CNN and most of the world's media carried the pictures. Later, when Saddam himself was captured, pictures of him being examined for lice were transmitted. His hanging was shown on television stations around the world, as was the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, and his wife Elena by firing squad. There are award-winning photographs of a man being shot in the head, and of children burned with napalm in Vietnam. Many articles on the Spanish civil war have been illustrated by Robert Capa's image of a loyalist militiaman at the moment of death.
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In Spain, standards are different. Following the 2004 Madrid railway bombing, El Pais was criticised for obscuring the faces of the dead in a front-page picture. Some accused the paper of sanitising the horror. In contrast, El Mundo printed a front-page picture of a dead man slumped in a carriage covered in rubble, and another paper on the evening of the bombing carried on its front page an image of a dead woman clutching the body of her baby.
Earlier this year, a Thai paper showed pictures of the actor David Carradine half naked after he accidentally hanged himself in a hotel room during a sex act.
Public taste changes with time, location and circumstance. The PCC will decide if the Sunday World has breached acceptability. The watchdog is concerned that newspapers should not break the news of death to relatives, or intrude on privacy.
Days later the dead man was named as Timothy Cheng, 41, but he was not identifiable from the wide-angle photograph and, since his name was not mentioned in the story, the news of his death was not broken to his family in this way. As for privacy, the point of the Sunday World story was that the body was in full public view.
The press must not encourage copycat attempts by glorifying suicide or giving excessive details of the method used, such as the number of pills needed to overdose. In this case, the only details given were the bare minimum, that death was by hanging from a bridge, and there was no glorification. It would be foolish to second-guess PCC decisions, but in this case the Sunday World may well be in the clear. Just the same, I doubt they will publish a picture like that again.