To know or not to know?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Graphic details of Charlie Kirk’s death have been almost unavoidable on social media in recent days. Similarly, shocking footage of an unprovoked knife attack on 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina last month, has been widely circulated. Add to that the videos coming out of Gaza, Ukraine or Sudan. Seeing such images changes us. We can’t unsee them. They shock us, anger us, frighten us, stir our empathy, shift our moral compass.
Do we have a moral duty to watch real-life violence order to gain a deeper understanding of a situation? For example, would George Floyd’s death have had the same imaginative power if it hadn’t been filmed? Or is the truth-seeking instinct sometimes misplaced, driven by morbid curiosity and voyeurism, risking desensitisation, compassion fatigue or, conversely, chronic anxiety and stress? Do such stark images give us a moral anchor in a storm of spin and misinformation, or are we in danger of missing important context and using the intimately personal moment of a human death as a weapon in a heated political arena? With social media moderators being cut and TV news channels under pressure to beat the competition for pictures, what does the choice to publish and consume ever more extreme content say about us, and the dignity of those whose lives and deaths we are a witness to?
When should we choose to see or not to see – to know or not to know?
Chair: Michael Buerk Panel: Giles Fraser, Sonia Sodha, James Orr and Tim Stanley. Witnesses: Paul Conroy, Hilda Burke, Jamie Whyte and Rik Peels. Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
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| 0:07.2 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast. |
| 0:09.4 | Absolutely right. |
| 0:11.5 | So, you might like to know that the BBC makes loads of other podcasts. |
| 0:15.6 | Really? |
| 0:16.4 | Wow. |
| 0:17.2 | Many of them are very funny. |
| 0:19.1 | Which I think means... |
| 0:20.3 | A hatful of ha-hars. And energy. Even if you do say so ourselves. I agree 100% of that. Find them all on BBC Sounds. Just tell us a joke. Come on, tell us a joke. Tell us a joke. Come on, tell us a joke. Just search comedy on BBC Sounds. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in. Good evening. I once witnessed a young man being butchered right in front of me and my cameraman |
| 0:42.9 | in one of South Africa's segregated black townships during the final crisis of apartheid. |
| 0:48.6 | I argued long and hard with the BBC that the murder should be shown. |
| 0:53.2 | Grownups, I said, ought to know what real violence looks like, how the fear and hatred it |
| 0:58.2 | caused dictated events. It was all cut out. I felt we'd risked our lives for nothing |
| 1:03.8 | and let viewers down. They needed to be confronted with reality. Now I'm not so sure. |
| 1:10.5 | Times change. The mainstream media was still |
| 1:13.4 | fastidious when it came to the killing of Charlie Kirk, but out there on the internet, |
| 1:18.1 | almost impossible to avoid, you can see everything. The bullet, the blood, the paroxysms of that |
| 1:23.9 | fatal trauma, all framed with touching grief and vile rejoicing. |
| 1:29.8 | Images like that change us. They stir us up for good and ill. Shock, anger, fear. Human sympathy, |
| 1:38.1 | hateful, abusive delight. They shift our moral compass. Do we have a duty to engage with the worst realities of the world around us, a moral obligation to watch? |
| 1:49.2 | Or is the choice of whether to know or not to know more complicated than that? |
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