When Is It Too Graphic?

It's sometimes hard to know where to draw the line between needing to document the reality of persecution and exposing more than what is necessary to do so. We faced that twice this week. The first had to do with the report that we put out in the Persecution and Prayer Alert concerning the desecration of a church building in Pec, Serbia. One picture in particular had obscene graffiti written on the walls in Albanian. One of our staff members was concerned that Serbian viewers may be offended if we were to publish this picture. We decided to go ahead because the pictures themselves had already been published by an organization associated with the Serbian Orthodox Church. It also seemed to me that it was more likely that Serbians would want the world to know more fully the fuller extent of the hatred that they are facing in Kosovo at the hands of Albanian Muslims. To this point, we have received no complaints about the picture.

We faced a second such decision later in the week as we were editing video footage from a massacre of Christians in Jimma, Ethiopia last October. We intend to include segments of this footage as an added feature to our upcoming video "Ethiopian Voices: Testimonies of the Persecuted." The video was taken by an amateur and, as such, the quality is not as good as we would normally use. But is the only first-hand documentation available of very important incident. It is also very graphic in detail and quite disturbing, but we believe that the world needs to see it. The temptation is to hide it away. But I believe that we cannot. I suspect that we will get some criticism over it, even though we will be adding a disclaimer and warning at the beginning of the segment. A longer, unedited version of this footage is already online on www.persecution.tv, if you would like to decide for yourself. We will probably be substituting this longer version shortly with the shorter version with translations of some of the conversations.

In today's world when we watch beheadings being done by terrorists online, autopsies being performed on the various versions of CSI, witness the aftermath of suicide bombings on newscasts, it is hard to know whether the decision to show the graphic nature of persecution is just a reflection of the current age or a necessary part of revealing the truth. I am still in a quandary about that, to be honest. But I think it is better to error on the side of the truth than on the side of caution. To be honest, it is rarely the persecuted who have an issue with us showing such scenes; it is usually someone who would rather avoid the issue altogether.