Where does newsworthiness end and manipulation begin? How should news organizations handle a brutally violent video that is clearly intended as a terrorist propaganda and recruitment tool?
The New York Times gave one answer to that question in its print edition on Wednesday by publishing, on an inside page, a black-and-white photograph of moderate size taken from the video from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, of the beheading of the freelance journalist Steven J. Sotloff. It did not publish or link to the video itself, but did publish other photographs of Mr. Sotloff from months or years earlier, including one on the paper’s front page.
I talked to the foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, about that decision and about various aspects of the coverage of this story, including how The Times verified the video’s authenticity and why references to Mr. Sotloff’s religion were initially included in a profile of him last week and then quickly removed.
“The still photograph doesn’t have the propaganda value of the video,” Mr. Kahn told me on Wednesday afternoon. It did, however, have significant news value, he said, “standing for and conveying the totality of the broader, horrible story.”
There was no serious thought given to using or linking to the video itself, he said – the precedent for that decision was set after a video showing the beheading of James Foley began to circulate. The Times did not publish or link to that video, either.
There is widespread disagreement about how to cover such an explosive story. Some media organizations have decided that using any visual reference to Mr. Sotloff’s beheading plays into the terrorist group’s propaganda tactics. Al Jazeera, for example, is observing a blackout of the images altogether. The Daily Beast published a piece by Jamie Dettmer saying that a media blackout actually helps ISIS. (Mr. Dettmer is not referring specifically to images of Mr. Sotloff, but rather to the problem of allowing ISIS to control the media narrative more generally.)
Mr. Kahn also addressed two other points I have heard about from Times readers. He said that Times editors were uncertain enough about the authenticity of the video Tuesday afternoon that they decided not to make the news of Mr. Sotloff’s death a news alert.
However, they did not wait for United States government verification, which did not come until Wednesday morning. Instead Times editors relied on internal expertise and observation from photo and news editors who watched the video, and they also took into account the verification by the organization that circulated the video, the SITE Intelligence Group, which Mr. Kahn said had been accurate and dependable in the past.
I also asked him about the brief presence in an online story last month of references to the fact that Mr. Sotloff was Jewish. Mr. Kahn said that the article was originally prepared for use only if ISIS carried through on its threat and killed him.
“The story was initially produced on the assumption that it would not be used until and unless ISIS followed through on their threat,” he said.
As interest built in the journalist, however, The Times decided to use the article, essentially changing the tenses.
Soon after it went online, he said, “it came to my attention that the identification of his religion was widely perceived as providing sensitive information.”
Although Mr. Kahn said that The Times had good reason to believe that ISIS already knew that Mr. Sotloff was Jewish, and that he was selected because he was an American and not because of his religion, “We felt that given that perception, it was better to quickly take the references out.” They were included in the article for about 30 minutes, he said.
My take on all of this: It clearly would have been wiser if the Sotloff profile had been entirely re-edited in advance with a careful eye to anything that might endanger the threatened journalist, or even appear to do so. Failing that, removing the references as quickly as possible was the right move.
On the timing and verification of the video, The Times exercised appropriate caution, even if it lost the ability to tell its readers earlier of the news.
And finally, The Times’s decision to use a small black-and-white video image on an inside page was a reasonable one, and I understand the newsworthiness argument. But not using anything at all from this despicable video would have been even better.