Reader-submitted question: I was dismayed to see the footage of the Georgian luger’s death shown over and over again on television yesterday. I wondered whether CTV really needed to show the footage to “tell the story”. If they had shown a shot of him hurdling down the track, then a shot of what he hit, with the explanation “he was going 134 km an hour” – I think I would have had enough of a mental picture to know “the story”. Just because you have great footage of an event, doesn’t mean that you have to show it. Maybe this is unfair, but I can’t help but wonder whether they would have shown the instant of this athlete’s death if he had been Canadian.

The accident happened while I was at work. I learned about it on Twitter: a journalist I follow was criticising the decision to air the video of the crash.

I went to journalism school in the 1990s. Way back then, there was a general rule that was discussed many times in our ethics classes: If a person is dead or dying in a photo or video, don’t show it.

This, of course, was not an absolute, but it was a good guideline. When the Swissair flight crashed near Halifax in 1998, my friends who covered it said they saw body parts floating in the water. They didn’t shoot any of it, and the CBC-TV reporter who did most of the national coverage told his videographer to turn the camera off.

That was before the Internet became what it is today. I remember helping a fellow student with a study for her thesis: it was about whether readers could get all of the news they needed from the Internet versions of large newspapers. Nowadays, that wouldn’t even be questioned. I almost never pick up a hard copy of a newspaper.

When the news is online, the reader decides how much information he wants. You can choose to click on the video or to avoid it. This provides some filtering for people who do not want to see such horrors. This, as it turns out, is CTV’s position. There is still a legitimate argument to be made that this sort of video should not be on CTV’s website, either, but at least it is up to the reader to make that decision.

There are no filters like that on TV. If the television is on, you’re going to watch whatever is on the screen. The “warnings” barely give you enough time to change the channel.

I have not watched the video. I do not need to see footage of a person dying in a tragic accident at 100 mph, and I would question whether it needs to be on television at all. Here’s a description from The Washington Post:

Rushing down the track, Kumaritashvili got into trouble when he took the next-to-last curve at a higher path than most lugers would prefer and careened up the banked, icy wall. He slid diagonally down the wall with his feet pointed the wrong way. As he hit the corner entering the final straightaway with his body, he was knocked off his sled and shot across the track, arms and legs flailing.

Less than a second later, Kumaritashvili’s upper body struck a steel post in place to hold up a metal roof along the end of the track. He came to rest on a metal walkway, his left leg in the air and left foot propped atop the track wall.

Nope, I don’t need to see the video. Words are enough. Maybe that’s a crazy idea nowadays.

Your point about the athlete’s nationality is an interesting one. Would Canadian broadcasters have been more sensitive if he had been Canadian? I suspect that you are correct. There would have been a huge outcry from his home province, and the footage would have been yanked almost immediately.

Thanks for your question. Readers, what do you think?