Broadcasting and editorial decisions: where do we draw that line?

Tonight I watched somebody be murdered on a mainstream news programme. Sky News were covering the breakdown of law and order in Kenya and decided to air footage of a street fight with a machete-wielding gang hacking into the body of a man running for his life. They sliced through his torso and limbs before he died. To be clear, the images came after the watershed and with the agreed caveat that the news report contained ‘scenes of violence’. I think I understand the regulations, and can judge Sky’s editorial choice well enough to pose a valid question: does this feel fundamentally wrong? There’s no question that the events in Kenya are anything other than tragic and shocking, but the story surely could have been told with equal accuracy using different techniques, or with much less violence and the correspondent describing the scene in cutaways. It seems like an exceptionally and unnecessarily graphic portrayal of atrocities, with no respect to the murder victim, nor others involved in the conflicts out there. I’ve been thinking about this all night because my attitude to content on self published websites is extremely liberal: for better or worse citizens should have the freedom of speech and the freedom to express. And that’s where I have this kind of dilemma – in a converged world should there be different standards for one of a thousand broadcast satellite channels, to those of a billion web channels? Maybe it’s the fact this was screened by a network that markets itself as a standard bearer for news that tips the balance? Maybe it’s the scale of the audience? Or maybe that the media consumption model for web news media is more granularly selective than broadcast and places more control in the hands of each user to select the next packet of content they download; a fundamental for the instant linear stream of a broadcast network. And in a world where the industry’s self-regulation or co-regulation is favoured, does an episode like flex the regulatory line? If so then others are bound to follow such a lead. The clip of the unedited violence was followed by clips of the bodies of more than a dozen dead piled high in a morgue – I don’t know the Ofcom code well enough but can guess this is probably supported, though as a package I think it escalated what felt like a sensationalist editorial decision. Am I just horridly out of touch with social values, or is there something more than ratings at stake here?