TV plans tasteful coverage of Saddam execution

[Barring unforeseen circumstances, Saddam Hussein will be hanged Saturday morning. Unlike the New York Times, where the implications of the killing were mulled over in a thoughtful editorial today ("The Rush to Hang Saddam Hussein"), the big worry at the networks, according to The Hollywood Reporter, is not over the morality or political or military impact of the action but whether it will be suitable for viewing by children.]

By Paul J. Gough (Reuters/The Hollywood Reporter)

Television networks face a killer of a conundrum with the impending execution of Saddam Hussein, whose hanging could be videotaped and perhaps aired on Iraqi TV. The timing of Saddam's date with the gallows was unclear [now scheduled for Saturday morning], but late Thursday CBS, NBC and Fox News Channel reported that the former dictator, convicted this year in the deaths of 148 people in 1982, would be turned over by the American military to the Iraqi government within 36 hours and hanged before the start of a Muslim holiday on Sunday.

Several sources said Saddam's execution would be videotaped by the Iraqi government, though it wasn't clear whether it would be released to the public or broadcast.

"We will video everything," Iraqi National Security adviser Mouffak al Rubaie told CBS News. Judging by the Iraqi government's release Tuesday of videotape of the hanging of 13 convicts, it could be a gruesome affair.

Meetings were held Thursday in at least two network headquarters over how to handle the potentially graphic images. ABC and CBS said they wouldn't air the full execution if the video became available.

"We're very aware that we're coming into people's living rooms and that there could be children watching," CBS News senior vp Linda Mason said. Mason and her network counterparts have broadcast standards and procedures they follow in these cases. Phil Alongi, special-events executive producer at NBC News, said there are ways the network can approach the video or photographs that will get the point across without having to be graphic.

The operative word: taste.

"We have very, very strict guidelines with how to deal with that," said Bob Murphy, senior vp at ABC News. "If there were pictures made availableof the execution, they would have to be viewed by senior management before we would put them on the air, and we would make a judgment of taste and propriety of what we would show."

CNN and Fox News Channel still were discussing what they would do if the footage were made available. It also wasn't clear what the newly launched network Al-Jazeera International would do. An e-mail and phone call to the channel's Qatar headquarters weren't returned Thursday. Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Al-Jazeera's pan-Arab channel has never shown an execution.

While video of an execution would be unprecedented in U.S. television, the war in Iraq has led to a number of judgment calls on graphic video. The U.S. military released graphic photographs of Saddam's two sons who were killed in a U.S. raid on their Mosul hideout in July 2003.

"We edited down the pictures to show only what was appropriate, what we thought was appropriate," Murphy said. "We didn't show the pictures live (when the network received them), and we made sure that they showed enough of the bodies so that it was clearly them, but we didn't dwell on it."(The rest of the story.)