Daniel Okrent, the NYT's public editor, talks about the paper's controversial selection of the following photo for its Dec. 28 front page: A grieving Indian mother on her knees, the floor around her littered with young children killed by the tsunamis.

I talk about it too.

Some excerpts from No Picture Tells The Truth. The Best Do It Better Than That:

First of all, here's a small version of the image in question (you can access a larger one by clicking through to the story):

Gautam Singh/Associated Press

This photo that appeared on the front page of The Times on Dec. 28 shocked or offended many readers.

Many readers and at least a few members of The Times's newsroom staff considered the picture exploitative, unduly graphic, and by its size and placement, inappropriately forced upon the paper's readers. Some felt it disrespectful of both the living and the dead. A few said The Times would not have published it had the children been white Americans. Boaz Rabin of Weehawken, N.J., wrote, "Lead with letters the size of eggs, use any words you see fit, but don't put a nightmare on the front page."

I asked managing editor Jill Abramson why she chose this picture. She said in an e-mail message that after careful and difficult consideration, she decided that the photo "seemed to perfectly convey the news: the sheer enormity of the disaster, as we learned one-third of the casualties are children in a part of the world where more than 50 percent of the population is children. It is an indescribably painful photograph, but one that was in all ways commensurate to the event." When I spoke with director of photography Michele McNally, who believes the paper has the obligation "to bear witness" at moments like this, she had a question for me: "Wouldn't you want us to show pictures from Auschwitz if the gates were opened in our time?"

Richard Avedon once said: "There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." ...

The day The Times ran the picture of the dead children, many other papers led with a photograph of a grief-racked man clutching the hand of his dead son. It, too, was a powerful picture, and it's easy to see why so many used it. But it was - this is difficult to say - a portrait of generic tragedy. The devastated man could have been in the deserts of Darfur, or in a house in Mosul, or on a sidewalk in Peoria; he could have been photographed 10 years ago, or 10 years from now. His pain was universal.

But the picture on the front page of The Times could only have been photographed now, and only on the devastated shores of the Indian Ocean. My colleague David House of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram says, "In this instance, covering life means covering death." The babies in their silent rows were as real, and as specific, as the insane act of nature that murdered them. This picture was the story of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 - not the truth, but a stand-in for the truth that will not leave the thoughts of those who saw it. The Times was right to publish it.

For some background, here's some other postings I've made related to this topic:

In that last one, the media had video of the bullet going into the hostage taker's head, along with the spray of blood and the hostage-taker's now-lifeless body hitting the concrete sidewalk.

My opinion back in late August was that the story wasn't advanced nor was any public interest served by showing the moment of the bullet's impact. This shooting was witnessed by hundreds, if not thousands of people. No one disagreed with the police's decision.

On the Dec. 28 NYT photo, I would have endorsed a decision to run it.

This was one of the most horrific natural disasters of our time.

To me, the mother's face tells a story of anguish and disbelief -- yet the young bodies around her provide irrefutable evidence that this tragedy is all too real and all too horrible.

And you know what? Not a blond tourist in the bunch.

To me, it encapsulates perfectly what the tsunami took away and that's what makes it a great news photo. It may offend some today, but I predict it will stand for eternity as part of the visual record of this disaster.

Here is an excerpt of a Jan.-Feb. 2005 Columbia Journalism Review article called Let's Blame The Readers:

Clearly, a declining newspaper business must pay attention to its customers’ wants if it is to survive. Good ideas about how to do this were in abundance at the APME (Associated Press Managing Editors) convention. And none of the journalists were saying that hard news coverage should be abandoned in pursuit of profits. But profits may be hard to come by if the public does not want to read the hard news.

At one APME event Michael Getler, ombudsman of The Washington Post, said the paper had received a lot of hate mail during the Watergate investigation, “from people who just didn’t want to know what was going on.” One of the embedded readers, a child-welfare worker from Delaware named John Bates, spoke of people he knew who did not like to read newspapers because the news is “so sad and depressing.”

The embedded readers, who came across as an unusually thoughtful, engaged group, evidenced this tendency themselves. At one session the APME attendees and those of the affiliated meeting of the Associated Press Photo Managers were asked to say whether they would have published certain grisly photographs on page one — a shot of Nicole Brown Simpson’s corpse, the burned bodies of American civilian contractors hanging from a bridge in Falluja, and so forth. Electronic voting allowed members of the audience to identify themselves by job (as editors or photo editors), and the embedded readers were also asked to vote. One of the photos rated was the iconic Abu Ghraib photo of a prisoner standing on a box, hooded, with wires attached to each hand. Of those who identified themselves as photo editors, 96 percent said that they either ran or would have run the photo on page one. But 71 percent of the embedded readers said it should not have been run on page one. Asked about the propriety of running photos of terrorists holding hostages, 60 percent of the photo editors were in favor of printing the pictures, but 78 percent of the readers were opposed.

A bit of a disconnect between editors and their audiences, eh?

While I think one should be mindful of the sensibilities of one's audience, I also think journalists have a responsibility to say sometimes: You need to look at this.

This tsunami disaster was one of those times.

What do you think? Please post a comment down below -- especially if you thoughtfully disagree with me. :)