Is the media addicted to violence porn?

Is a photograph that reveals bare violence a news story or is it violence porn? This is an endless debate.
Most journalists would say a photograph of Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov lying on the floor and the murderer standing next to him in his hand as a frame that “absolutely has to be shown.” 

If a representative of a foreign state in a country is killed in front of the eyes of everybody, it is a news story. The picture of that moment is a very important factor of the story. 

Or is it not? 

Did it help the reader/viewer grasp the event better seeing the body of the ambassador on the floor? I guess an IQ of about 30 is enough to guess that an assassinated person’s body lies on the floor. How correct is this type of journalism in trying to show the gravity of the incident with the exposition of the body? Is this freedom of reporting or is this violence porn? 

I don’t have a clear answer; I only have several questions in my mind.

I have the opinion that the answer changes according to each individual situation. I object, for instance, to publishing and sharing the bodies of Syrian children in blood. Is it a healthy mentality to publish the photo of a dead 5-month-old?   

If you ask me, I would say that the photo of a dead baby is less devastating than a mother grieving over her dead children while one of the surviving children holds back tears to avoid adding to the mother’s sorrow. 
This is one dimension of the matter.

Another one was pointed out by my colleague Cansu Çamlıbel. While the West publishes the tragedies of others, deeming them newsworthy, how often do they convey their own tragedies to the reader? 

For instance, it the assassinated envoy was not Russian but American, would the West publish that photo?

 When the U.S. ambassador to Libya was brutally murdered, did their newspapers publish his photos? Did we see one photo of a body on Sept. 11? 

When the subject is U.S. officials, the U.S. press is not keen to publish the photos of the deceased even at wartime. Hundreds of Americans died during the Iraq war but almost none of their photos were published. 

Is Karlov’s body not as sacred as that of his U.S. counterpart? Doesn’t he also have a family? Doesn’t he have a country? Why is the West ambivalent on this? 

Or, for instance, if it were a Dutch kid instead of Alan Kurdi, would they still have printed that photo? I don’t think so. Western countries never publish such photos of their own children. 

Galatasaray University Professor Ceren Sözeri said photos of violence accustom people to violence, make them inactive and isolate them from their environment, yet she added that pictures depicting the horror of war are sometimes more effective than text. 

The important thing there is not to transform the image or the story into a sentimental exploitation case.

 “Like in the [Alan] Kurdi photo, one image explains everything but if you turn this into a ‘Poor [Alan]’ story, then you would be disregarding the entire refugee issue and would be cleansing your conscience over him. I am against sentimental reporting; otherwise that image has been engraved into people’s minds, right?”
While we discuss ethical journalism and the damages to society or lack thereof, Sözeri highlighted the essential aspect: “There is actually no meaning in saying, ‘Let’s not use this image’ in the world at this moment. It does not work because even if the BBC is not using it, you can see it easily elsewhere.”

However, let us still not forget that images of violence glorify violence, and this plays into the hands of the terror networks that have this precise goal.