Images: Screenshots from Life News' broadcast
Warning: This post contains graphic images.Yesterday, many thousands of people watched bloodied bodies, children's among them, smolder in faraway wreckage through the halting purview of a Russian livestream. The ground was a blanket of charred ruin, and tongues of smoke lifted into the air from certain patches of the rubble.
A man sorted through a pile of dirtied passports. He opened one to reveal the cherubic face of a 10-year-old Dutch boy. The image froze, a gray circle appeared in the middle of the screen, along with a Russian word we can assume meant something like 'buffering.'
Russia's Life News was among the first on the ground after word spread that another commercial flight from a Malaysian airliner had fallen from the sky. Hundreds were dead, Ukraine was already blaming Russia, and vice versa, and a thick black plume was trailing into the sky. In the beginning, the outlet was livestreaming, and the link was circulating on Twitter, and thousands were clicking.
And Life News, a private, heavily pro-Russia news outlet, delivered the carnage. All of it. There was no filter; the outlet's cameras zoomed in on the wreckage, the naked bodies, the billowing smoke, the tiny menacing fires, the severed limbs, the travel books. Someone had been headed to Bali for vacation.
We saw morbidly curious bystanders and disaster responders picking through the wreckage, hosing down the site. There were reports that people were looting the crash site, but if they were, they were being discreet about it on the feed.
Soon, Life News' journalists gathered the passports they'd found into a pile and began picking them up and leafing through them, on camera. Passports of people, of children, that had, hours ago, been reclining their seats in Ukraine's airspace. That might have been the moment when it all felt too much.
That kid is dead now. The unblurred version that ran in the initial livestream shared her name and birthday and picture, published on the internet minutes after she was discovered. She was 10 years old. This was no longer journalism; it was voyeurism.
Eventually, the livestream ended, and the format reverted back to a more traditional hosted newsroom format. The host and her expert guests delivered commentary as the outlet recycled bits of the livestream footage, and began to censor the sensitive images upon repeat. The bodies were not initially blurred out. Like an exponentially grislier version of CNN with its own previous Malaysian plane coverage, Life News repeated the footage all day, over and over.
It's still graphic stuff, so be forewarned; highlights of the broadcast were uploaded to YouTube:
The mode of viewership is common now, of course; livestream journalism is bordering on mainstream. We've watched the Ukrainian conflict itself unfold through an unfiltered feed. Meanwhile, violent LiveLeak videos of warfare in Syria and beyond are plentiful and easily enough accessible. But there is something exceptional and somewhat disturbing about the effort to document the downed plane and the mass death it caused, this livestream of the dead.
Livestreams are increasingly popular because they offer the public a window into what it's like to be on the ground during a major event. The livestreamer is a mobile proxy for the viewer, who's stuck in an office or dorm room, watching from a laptop. VICE's Tim Pool popularized the medium alongside other journalists at Occupy Wall Street, where interest in the form spiked because people wanted to know what it felt like to be thrust amidst a chanting throng in New York, to stand up against Wall Street titans and NYPD officers. You're empathizing with the stream; it's an emotional conduit for the messy action of real life.
But Life News' livestream was a nonstop roll of corpses and calamity. There's no empathy for the human stand-in here; who among us would pick through a brand new aboveground tomb and stare at the dead, zooming in—for hours? I have witnessed tragedies unfolding in person, but I have not lingered as these cameras did. I tried to help, even if I failed, but I did not stare as a voyeur at dead human beings as they were discovered in realtime.
There's already plenty of controversy around the distribution of images of death online. Buzzfeed, for instance, found itself at the center of controversy when it embedded a video clip of a live suicide that Fox News had accidentally aired on television. Yet there is undeniably an audience for such graphic imagery, and some feel that refusing to share it dumbs down a news organizations' portrayal of reality. A 2010 University of Arizona study found that young Americans especially thought that news shouldn't filter out scenes of death—and that during the Iraq war, they turned in multitudes to Al Jazeera, which was much less squeamish about showing the "raw images" than outlets like CNN and MSNBC.
This desire to see the pure, unfiltered truth—gore and all—no doubt, is spurring news organizations to push the envelope with their live coverage, and to share rolling live streams.
"Younger audiences, especially the ‘YouTube' generation, seek graphic visual images in a far different way than audiences did before the World Wide Web," Shahira Fahmy, the author of the ASU study, said at the time. "This has serious implications for the news media. I think it's time for media organizations to amend their ethical codes to allow for more graphic visuals in an effort to provide a more comprehensive and realistic view of war and conflict to US audiences."
Major media organizations may or may not have amended said codes much, but other orgs—including VICE—have moved to fill the void. And this is a good thing, the vast majority of the time. Fewer filters means access to a fuller truth.
But even if some things, perhaps, should not be livestreamed, it's probably too late for such pointless proclamations, as 'should or shouldn't' is rendered moot by the march of ever-cheaper, versatile mobile technology. It had marched up to the tragic crash site in Eastern Ukraine, and was feeding every detail into our screens. Along with the livestream, there were YouTube videos, of course, uploaded by nearby citizens who saw the crash site smoke.
We are building increasingly three-dimensional recreations of tragic events, and we are doing it with increasingly rapidity. We are capable of creating immersive replicas of these tragic environments to wander through; in this case a crashed plane on field now littered with hundreds of bodies. We have tools like Storify that help people curate, share, and accelerate their reconstruction of events; the future of learning about mass disaster is being bombarded by all of these responses, all at once.
Some would argue that this is beneficial; that it may ratchet up our empathy for such events, and allow us to understand and experience them in a way not previously possible. Others argue that it is doing the opposite. The New York Times wrote this of a 2010 study that found youths' capacity for empathy was on a decline: "the authors speculate a millennial mixture of video games, social media, reality TV and hyper-competition have left young people self-involved, shallow and unfettered in their individualism and ambition." And a 2013 study concluded that exposure to violent media reduced the viewer's capacity for empathy. Those findings are, of course, in dispute.
Regardless, we're probably going to have to start being a bit more careful with how we engage livestreams, and our immersive experience of death. In-detail portraits of the newly dead and sensitive personal information of the deceased were published with crystal clarity yesterday, in scenes many found too gut-wrenching to watch. The real-life gore that once lurked deep in online forums is now on the brink of becoming a major factor in online journalism, a click away from anyone with a Twitter account. There are a lot of questions—and there's lingering uncertainty about how well-equipped we humans are to wander through sites of mass death, day after day.
Luggage
and belongings are seen near the site of the MH17 crash, near the
settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk region July 18, 2014. — Reuters pic
GRABOVE,
July 18 — A guidebook on Bali and a children’s card game lie amid the
debris of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 as emergency workers pick
through the grisly carnage of the vast crash site, recovering corpse
after corpse.“Anatoly, come over here. There are a lot more in this field,” a fireman shouts to his colleague as a light rain falls.
A day after the passenger jet was apparently shot down by a missile in rebel-held eastern Ukraine, dozens of fire trucks from surrounding towns were at the scene.
But with the debris scattered for kilometres, under-equipped emergency crews were clearly overwhelmed by the scale of the tragedy.
Hours after the disaster, an AFP crew at the site saw dozens of severely mutilated corpses still lying at the crash site after eyewitnesses reported seeing the plane disintegrate in mid-air.
Two engines, a piece of a landing gear and chunks of the fuselage dotted with windows were strewn about as melted metal solidified in pools.
The sound of dogs barking could be heard in the distance. Separatist fighters at the site said they will shoot any animals that come to scavenge there.
Kiev has blamed the rebels and their alleged Russian backers for downing the plane. But the separatist deny the claim and have vowed to protect the scene and allow investigators access to the crash site.
In the Gallery
A man walks past the Malaysia Airlines check-in area at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang July 18, 2014. — Reuters pic
The rebels have also suggested that they are willing to agree to a temporary truce to facilitate the recovery but the sound of faraway explosions can still be heard sporadically.
Along a country road, a mini-bus has been converted into a crisis unit with 18 miners from a nearby pit serving as volunteers.
“Of course, it’s scary but we can’t leave them like that,” says Ivan, 54, a miner of 28 years, referring to the victims.
In the background the noise of a volley of Grad multiple rocket launcher is heard.
“Hear that, there they are again bombing the peaceful population” he says.
There are no crowds of curious onlookers at the scene and the inhabitants of a nearby hamlet remain indoors trying to make sense of the carnage that they’ve witnessed.
“You understand, it was as if a three-storey building came down but missed us,” Pavel, 45, a farmer told AFP as he looked at some of the fuselage lying a hundred metres from his house.
“I’m in shock and will never forget it. We really almost died. It smells like death.” Another crew of emergency workers walks past carrying a fresh bundle of sticks to use as markers.
One of them lets slip it is unlikely that all of the victims can be recovered.
“We realise that we’ll never find all of them in an area of 25 square kilometres,” he says. — AFP
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