Yesterday I watched with the rest of the world as the historical events in Libya unfolded. From the initial reports that Muammar Gaddafi was captured to his death it got me thinking about how the amount of censorship has changed in the news the past decade.
My mind cast back to when I was in school. I can remember we were doing a project on the World War II. The teacher at the time was explaining about Mousillini last days then quickly ran around the classroom confiscating the books as it contained an photo of Mussolini after he was hanged.
Yet even then the news was different. In order to see what was happening we had to watch the nightly news or, if you were lucky, use Teletext (Anyone here remember Ceefax and Oracle?). It was only a world changing event that was deemed significant enough to be given a “Newsflash” and even those were somewhat censored.
The death of someone was often hidden in the news, a body would be censored and newspapers would occasionally publish such an image. Yet I question if this was a good thing or not. Certainly the first dead body I ever saw in person was a relative, not anyone famous in a tabloid.
So fast forward to 2011 and now its constant access. We have 24-hour news channels, video sites where people can upload anything without any level of censorship. Indeed it seems that the more graphic the event, the more viewers it will attract.
When Saddam Hussein was executed several sites containing his death were shut down due to the sheer number of hits from people trying to see. The top Twitter Trending topic for days was people searching for images of the corpse of Osama Bin Laden. Finally, yesterday was the same, more people visited websites containing the execution video of Gaddafi than those with a limit of censorship.
I don’t think it’s a matter of are we more morbid than the previous generation but that the technology we have today has made people more resilient to shocking videos and images. But there will always exist that small element that are obsessed with the intricate details of famous and infamous deaths.
