The Times (in print and on its website) and Mail Online have published photographs taken by Isis which show the group executing prisoners.

These barbaric images of murder have clearly been released for propaganda reasons, part of the terror group’s media strategy to portray itself as utterly ruthless.

Isis has long distributed, via the internet, videos and photographs of its operatives carrying out ever more grisly forms of murder and torture.

It presents western media with a dilemma: should news outlets show these graphic images in order to demonstrate the wickedness of the perpetrators or is it better if they are merely described?

By reproducing such pictures, are we falling into the trap of doing Isis’s work for it? After all, we are aware that propaganda sets out to influence people in order to further a political agenda. So who benefits from their being shown?

Given people’s ghoulish nature (or, less perjoratively perhaps, their understandable desire to witness reality), there is also a question about carrying the images in order to maximise audience. Call it terror as clickbait.

On the other hand, it could be argued that people do need to see how this group carries out its slaughter in a premeditated, calculated fashion.

The decision by the Times and Mail to publish images showing prisoners being drowned and others being decapitated by an explosive cable coincides with statements from two Google executives arguing against the use of Isis propaganda on Google-owned YouTube.

The company’s policy director, Victoria Grand, outlined the dilemma for editors in a single sentence:

“The challenge for us is to strike this balance between allowing people to be educated about the dangers and the violence of this group, but not allowing ourselves to become a distribution channel for this horrible, but very newsworthy, terrorist propaganda”.

She was critical of outlets, which included Fox News, for running footage of the death of a Jordanian fighter pilot that was blocked by Google.

Conceding that censoring the footage was a “tough call” she said: “It was technically news but we decided that for some types of content, including Isis staged executions, the frame or news context put around it just can’t transform the original.

“It was brutally violent propaganda produced by terrorists and we just don’t want YouTube to be a distribution channel for it”.

Her argument strikes me as valid and sensible, even though I must also accept that it grants Google rights over what people should and shouldn’t see. But these are specific and horrific circumstances that require a special response.

So, in the light of that, I think Mail Online and the Times were wrong to publish the images (and it is the reason that I am refusing to provide links to either).

I cannot see how those images do other than play into the hands of Isis. That’s the political argument. Then there is a matter of taste: these pictures appeal to the baser side of human nature, to ghouls.

I accept, in company with Grand, that it is all about balance. But that’s why we have editors. They make those tough calls. The Times and Mail Online should reconsider what they have done.