On his Thursday broadcast of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough made the case that media organizations, including his own outlet, should offer viewers the opportunity to see the ISIS video that shows a Jordanian pilot being burned alive.
The reason he says is to show the “face of evil.”
“I would be uncomfortable showing the entire thing on television because of the nature of the audience,” Scarborough said. “I think people should have the ability to see it on a link with a news organization. I think we should have shown more here. I think we should have shown him standing there with the flames surrounding him because you really do get a better grasp of the evil that we’re facing. But then again, I’m the guy — I still wonder why we sanitize what happened on 9/11 by not showing the horror of the moment that the planes hit the towers or when the towers were crashing. And the reason I say that is, because the world would have been better served if we had seen the horrors of Auschwitz in 1942 instead of the spring of 1945. Likewise, you look at the beginning of the war — we certainly had no problem showing all of our ships blown up and sinking in Pearl Harbor. I think you show the face of evil — not to whip emotions up, not for propaganda purposes on either side, but because it happened. That’s the news. And we need to see the face and the results of what evil has done.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor