The radio stations were on early this morning - was it right and proper for newspapers to publish front pages pictures of a man they called a terrorist brandishing a meat cleaver?

Answer: yes. There are all sorts of arguments in favour. Practical and technological first - pictures and film clips of the incident were across social media within minutes. Newspapers (and TV) would have looked completely daft to ignore what was already in the public domain.

The man wasn't trying to hide from the spotlight. He was aware he was "speaking to camera" in order to deliver "a message" that attempted to justify his unjustifiable act.

It could be said that the media were playing into his hands by giving him the publicity he was seeking. But, given the situation, there was a need to explain. And the pictures lifted from the filmed footage were therefore essential to the exercise.

This was a highly unusual event that, by its very unusualness, warranted an unusual response from the media. It was barbaric, horrific, tragic, senseless… even a collective of adjectives is inadequate to describe what happened.

I agree that the image was appalling. The meat cleaver. The bloodied hands. The obvious rage of the perpetrator. It prompted my two elder grandsons, who mostly ignore the papers on the table in the mornings, to ask all sorts of questions.

On the way to school, the discussion continued. They were, of course, desperate to understand why two men had hacked another man to death in a London street on a spring afternoon.

After I had dropped them off I thought more about the problems all editors faced and, it should be noted, all but one (the counter intuitive Daily Express) took the same decision.

It is possible to argue against publication from two opposing directions: the image of a brazen killer will encourage others to follow suit, leading to more Islamic terrorist outrages; or the image will encourage anti-Muslim feeling and generate Islamophobia.

But media editors, while wishing to avoid provoking anti-social and criminal behaviour, cannot be responsible for far-fetched consequences of their decision to publish news stories. Editors cannot edit in order to ensure they protect us from the feeble-minded. It would make the job impossible and, taken to its logical conclusions, nothing would ever get published.

Editors also confronted a second problem in whether to carry pictures of the dead man's body, which also required them to pause for thought. Would it be regarded as an intrusion into the grief of his relatives? Would it be regarded as tasteless?

Again, on balance, I think the newspapers were correct because they needed to convey the brutality of a murder that appeared to have been carried out as an act of terrorism. It was shocking to see it but it was even more shocking that it happened at all.

There may be objections later that the pictured men cannot expect to get a "fair" trial. I somehow feel that a judge will laugh any such legal quibble out of court.

Newspaper editors, in trying to do their job - in company with television news editors - were confronted with a bizarre and barbarous act. They had to react as they did.

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