It is always dangerous to throw stones when you live in a glass house - and The Royal Gazette has plenty of glass to go around - but it would seem that the Bermuda Broadcasting Company erred when it showed graphic images of the two bodies at Abbot's Cliff last week.

It is always a tough call when news organisations come into possession of these kinds of pictures. The media is in the business of presenting reality. Pictures can often express the reality of a situation better than the proverbial thousand words. Few people would be able to comprehend the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, the effects of nuclear bombs or some of the excesses of the Vietnam War without the help of photographic images that are seared on the world's collective memory. In these cases, there is little to be gained from “protecting” people from the power of the pictures.

Many of the pictures and videotape that have come out of Iraq in the last two years have been horrendous, not the least of which were the pictures of US contractors who had been burned and then hung from a bridge. A case can be made that these images show the reality of the Iraq war in a way that words could not. And certainly they showed an anger among the Iraqi people that could not be denied.

It is also easier to publish these images with the benefit of geographical and psychological distance. Events that happen thousands of miles away or in circumstances that are nearly unimaginable here in Bermuda mean that people can look at them with greater ease than when they are closer to home.

The display of the bodies at Abbot's Cliff was very close to home, and very careful editorial judgment needed to be used. A good deal of consideration needs to be given to the feelings of the family, friends and neighbours of the victims. What has to be balanced against that is the degree to which the broader public interest is served by publishing or broadcasting them.

In this case, the BBC tried to make the case that the crime scene had been breached and the photos were proof of that. Given that a crime scene in the same general investigation was set on fire some weeks ago, this was, in effect, the BBC's public interest defence of the use of the images.

Some people will see this as a way of justifying getting the pictures on the air. It can also be argued that the BBC could have reported the same story and said it was in possession of the pictures but had chosen not to broadcast them because they were too graphic. What little the BBC would have lost in credibility would have been regained in respect.

Of course, all of this is easy to say with the benefit hindsight. It would be nice to think that this newspaper, armed with the same photos, would have decided not to publish them. But decisions in the media business have to be made when there is never enough time, when the atmosphere is made more fraught because of the intense public interest in a particular story and because of the awareness that you have a “scoop” on your hands.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that it is always worth taking a little extra time with stories that are as sensitive as this one before airing or publishing them.