Today, with smartphones, social media, and various other technologies, the conversation about privacy is becoming increasingly complicated.
Many of us have felt this in our daily lives. We feel pressured to post a picture of our vacation on social media because everyone else is doing it. Then there is the unsettling feeling that practically anyone can see that picture now even with private accounts. Social media users practically open up their lives to anyone who wants to see them. There is also a lack of privacy from people we know. Phones and technology have made it so that we are always only a phone call or text away. Our technology allows other people to feel entitled to our time. It feels like we can not get a second to ourselves when our phones and other technology are constantly watching us.
Then there are those of us who experience this to an extreme: celebrities. They cannot walk out on the street without paparazzi and fans trying to take photos. There is a constant media presence in their lives. People are dying to know every last detail, like what they eat or wear in their everyday lives. The public’s constant obsession with celebrity lives can even be considered a factor in the death of Princess Diana. The saddest part is that this obsession never stops, even when the person in question dies.
The world lost Liam Payne, the singer and star of boy band One Direction, on Oct. 16. Payne was 31 when he fell from a third-story hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He suffered 25 injuries to his skull, chest, abdomen, and limbs which led to both internal and external bleeding.
While the news coverage has been extensive and upsetting, there was one news outlet that took things too far: TMZ. Hours after Payne’s passing, TMZ published its first article on the loss. The article included cropped photos of Payne’s lifeless body, specifically showing his tattoos on his arm and abdomen. While the photos were not necessarily gory, they were still visually upsetting. This was unsettling to many readers and highly controversial. Readers were left disturbed after seeing the images while also grieving for Payne’s family and wondering if Payne wasn’t entitled to some privacy in his most vulnerable state.
As journalists, we are taught to avoid harm. This means we would not write or publish anything that could cause harm to people associated with the story.
This is not the first time TMZ has published death photos. In 2017, TMZ published graphic photos of rockstar, Chirs Cornell’s suicide. The photos featured a splatter of blood and the exercise equipment Cornell used to hang himself. TMZ also faced backlash after posting photos of Kobe and Gianna Bryant’s helicopter crash site. In the case of Payne and the Bryants, their loved ones saw these photos before authorities had even contacted them. This took many options away from the family. How they would announce the death from their side, and how many details they would want to include. This also put the family’s emotions more in the public eye since they did not get time to grieve before the rest of the world found out. In light of Payne’s photos being published, Cornell’s daughter Toni Cornell has spoken out on Instagram about the controversy sharing her own experiences with her father’s pictures.
“As a 12-year-old, I stumbled upon those pictures while scrolling through my iPad, and it was indescribably traumatizing, and something I still carry with me to this day,” said Cornell in an interview with Billboard.“TMZ still has not chosen to have the decency, seven years later, to remove those photos from the internet.”
Since the initial backlash, TMZ has taken the photos of Payne down.
A point defending TMZ’s actions would be that Payne was a public figure who made choices that led to a public death. TMZ’s Executive Producer Michael Babcock defended the news outlet’s choice to publish the photo.
“When the information was coming in, police had not yet confirmed that it was Liam, so what was done on the TMZ website, [was] used as a way to confirm, or to match up the tattoos. And then, once they did, obviously, that photo was removed,” Babcock said.
Typically journalists would identify a body using a police report. Police reports are a public good. This means that anyone in the world has access to them. TMZ could have been trying to be the first to report on the death, but it was predictable that every major news outlet would want this story. TMZ could have also used the tattoos as evidence that it was Payne’s body without showing his body to the whole world.
Payne’s status as a public figure did relinquish some of his privacy. The circumstances of his death, specifically that it was in a public area, also complicate the privacy Payne could have received. There is a big difference between spectators seeing the body and people learning about his death through the internet, and almost everyone in the world seeing pictures of his body. It is not only that these pictures are disturbing to the people who loved him, but also the lack of compassion they were published with. In publishing the photos, TMZ did not provide necessary information or comfort to viewers and people who knew Payne therefore showing a lack of compassion for both Payne’s privacy and the well-being of his friends and family. There is no way that TMZ was trying to minimize harm when they published the photos. While TMZ may have been trying to get a jump on the story, that does not justify their decision to publish highly invasive and disturbing pictures without permission.
These photos will live on the internet forever. Anyone can see them. One of the most heartbreaking parts is Payne’s seven-year-old son, Bear, will most likely grow up to see these photos and have a similar traumatizing experience to the one Cornell described. TMZ did not post these photos while thinking about Payne’s loved ones who could be affected therefore creating harm and not following commonly known journalistic ethics.
