Gov’t and media look to ban violent front page photos in Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

Gov’t and media look to ban violent front page photos in Honduras
Date published: March 18, 2011

After La Prensa newspaper unilaterally decided to stop publishing photos of dead bodies to avoid sensationalising the increase in violence in the country, the Honduras Journalists’ Guild (CPH) and the government are now working towards an agreement that would remove violent photos from newspaper covers, La Tribuna reports, according to Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Meeting with the union to discuss the killings of 11 Honduran journalists over the last year, Security Minister Oscar Álvarez agreed that papers should “not glorify crime.” “What we do is accept it and come to see it as something normal, which should not be so. The people should reject this violence,” he said, quoted by El Heraldo.

CPH president Juan Ramón Mairena explained that the journalists have proposed a “News pact for a Cultural of Peace,” with the goal of ending the practice of “publishing more sensationalism on the front page and newscasts showing gruesome footage.”

“This has nothing to do with censorship…we are talking about an act of conscience by media owners and us as journalists in response to the surge in violence that is affecting us,” Mairena said, quoted be La Tribuna.

http://www.newswatch.in/newsblog/9285

[EFerrari]

1. Too bad they won't ban government violence against their own citizens instead. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

2. Isn't that a hot one? They've got the local media bending over backwards to accomodate them.

Without a doubt all they had to do in any "meetings" with the media owners was to remind them of what they already did to the anti-coup tv and radio stations, when they sent soldiers who went in and poured acid into the equipment, etc., etc., etc. and started physically threatening the staffs, backed up by killing some of them.

That violence against Hondurans started the day they opened fire on that young man who turned out at the airport to see the arrival of President Zelaya. What an astonishing coincidence it was that he just happened to be the son of an anti-coup activist.

You recall at that time, the pro-coup media actually photoshopped the photos taken of the victim, removing the steady stream of blood flowing from his head as they picked him up to carry him gently somewhere to lay his body down, away from the crowd.