YOU NEVER KNOW when the media circus might come to town. Disaster in an age of global communications demands an instant running commentary.

Between the tragedy and the representation, there used to be a pause for thought. The images that commemorated such disasters, or the stories told about them, consciously took sides and pointed morals. They did so in retrospect, reviving a moment from the past in order to ponder its significance. Today, the technologies of news-gathering have accelerated the cycle and garbled it; the event is interpreted for us while we’re watching it happen, and the interpreters are participants.

In Berkeley this week, photographers were on site immediately. Six Irish young people, including one student with dual Irish-American citizenship, all aged 21 or 22, were killed when the apartment balcony they were gathered on during a 21st birthday celebration collapsed. Seven others were injured.

Controversial media coverage at home and abroad

On one hand, news media were informing a public at home that could watch the tragedy with a sort of theoretical sympathy, as if at a disaster movie: of course it was terrible, but – like fiction – it was situated at a safe, comfortable distance from our reality. The news has become another consumer item. The satellite receivers on our roofs are called dishes, and they feed us images. Have we developed an appetite for horrors like this?

The Irish Daily Star and Irish Examiner have been criticised for printing pictures which show the body bags of some of the six students. The New York Times used the tragedy of a balcony collapsing to bring up negative stories about J1 students in the past. “They come by the thousands — Irish students on work visas, many flocking to the West Coast to work in summer jobs by day and to enjoy the often raucous life in a college town at night,” it began.

“The work-visa programme used by Irish students has “become not just a source of aspiration, but also a source of embarrassment for Ireland, marked by a series of high-profile episodes involving drunken partying and the wrecking of apartments in places like San Francisco and Santa Barbara.”

Reporters and photographers have repeatedly caused offence

The Secretary of the National Union of Journalists has said anyone who has taken offence to media coverage of the Berkeley balcony tragedy should raise their complaints with the Press Council of Ireland. Secretary of the NUJ, Seamus Dooley said: “People who are unhappy should make a point of contacting the newspaper and protesting. As a member of the Press Council of Ireland a newspaper is expected to adhere to a Code of Conduct that specifically relates to privacy and bereavement.”

“Under Principle 5.3, sympathy and discretion must be shown at all times. In publicising such information, families should be taken into account. If anyone feels that the code has been transgressed, they should complain to the newspaper and subsequently the Press Council.”

Such warnings have become necessary because reporters and photographers have repeatedly caused offence in their efforts to bring news of this tragedy to their audiences. Journalism scrambles to keep up with the muddled, messy happenings of the day; history arranges the snapshots into a picture, or into what used to be called a history painting.

What does it mean to bear witness?

The graphic imagery that is now just a mouse-click away has stoked intense debate about its use by news media. The belief that the use of graphic images in news reporting is inherently ethically wrong is a very western belief. This belief is as fiercely defended by supporters as a way to preserve the dignity and humanity of the victims as it is attacked by critics as a wish to sanitise unpalatable truths. The reality of modern news coverage often lies somewhere in between.

Graphic material is recorded and uploaded for many reasons: as evidence, a call for help, a threat, a howl of rage at injustice, and, yes, sometimes out of simple morbid fascination. Whatever the motivation, unedited images of human suffering and death on social media have reignited a valid discussion about what it means to bear witness, where the public’s sensitivities lie and ultimately where to strike the balance between the two.

But victim blaming is a very different thing. It’s never justified. Accidents only produce tragedies that should be reported on – sensitively.

Lorraine Courtney is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Twitter @lorrainecath.