Abstract In the United States, news outlets avoid showing postmortem images. Recent rises in school shootings have intensified debates about whether photojournalism should document the dead bodies of students killed. Some experts claim that these controversial images would increase public support for gun control and thereby save lives. However, other experts argue that these images should be banned because they cause audiences to experience compassion fatigue, desensitization, or intense distress and suspicions of media bias. Because the effects are unknown, we conducted an experiment to empirically evaluate these competing claims. In a preregistered, randomized, controlled, online experiment ( n = 1020 adults), participants viewed either photographs depicting victims' dead bodies, survivors embracing, on‐duty law enforcement, related headlines, or a prompt to “think about” fatal school shootings. Compared to the control conditions, the results do not suggest that postmortem images change support for gun control policies or perceptions of media bias. Importantly, the results do not suggest that news media need to censor these images to protect the public because we did not find evidence that postmortem pictures diminish compassion or traumatize viewers. They may even increase compassion. In sum, the news media may be justified in comprehensively documenting, rather than sanitizing, the nation's ongoing crisis of gun violence.
Fishman et al. (Fri,) studied this question.