If it bleeds, it leads. Every journalist knows this by heart. Among all stories gathered in a day, if there was significant death, rape, or spilled blood, it will be top in the news. And the gorier it was, the more priority it will receive in the bulletin. Like it or not, this is a rule of thumb in journalism. But is it good reason to ruin appetites at dinnertime?

"I don’t watch news anymore," said Janet, a working student of International Relations at a Nairobi university. "There’s nothing new. If it’s not politics, it’s violence, violence and more violence." Janet has every reason to keep abreast of current affairs. Yet, she complained, our television news hardly satisfies this quest.

The past three weekends, in particular, stood out with violence. The country’s two most watched urban channels, KTN and NTV filled over half their news time with stories of murder and rape. On one channel, a camera would be rolling with raw pictures of blood splattered all over a murdered Maseno University student’s room. On the other channel, a reporter would be going on and on about a girl-child’s ruptured tendons after a rape ordeal.

Dinner won’t be palatable over such stories on television. But, who wants to talk about dinner when the country is getting infested with murderers and rapists? Only heartless people tucked away in their upmarket suburbs would care about food when fellow countrymen were getting butchered and raped; right? But, news people don’t care about dinner appetites. They care about telling you what happened; in order of impact, prominence, proximity, and all those reasons people care to watch the news for. So this is not about dinner. This is about how much violence is okay to watch on news.

Jeff Koinange, CNN’s West Africa Bureau Chief, had an answer on Thursday. "You cannot sugar-coat things," he said on NTV’s late night talk show, The Fourth Estate. "If bad things happen, they have to be told."

Still, nobody, except perverts, delights in violence and tragedy. We would not be so civilised. Isn’t journalism, therefore, betraying human civilisation? Civilisation, said Will Durant, is a stream with banks. The Gentle Philosopher, as he is reputedly known, wrote that the stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record.

But, on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry. The story of civilisation is the story of what happens on the banks. Yet journalism appears perpetually preoccupied only with what is going on in the stream. Why? Why is tragedy still a first story for journalism?

Look at it this way: journalism is tasked primarily with providing citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing. There is good argument that knowledge of the goings on in the stream provides better options on how do deal with the issues on the banks. And there is no better way to tell a story than with pictures. Pictures usually make better impact on viewers; simply because their capacity to shock far exceeds that of language. That is precisely why disturbing accident images should be printed in newspapers and ran on television, Nora Ephron, an acclaimed novelist, said candidly. "That they disturb [people] is exactly as it should be: that’s why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism."

The obvious underlying philosophy here is Hedonism. Often, the only motivation for running graphically violent images is because they were sensational and would sell newspapers and glue viewers to a news channel. It is the same reason tabloids give their readers a steady diet of cows with two heads and babies with three legs. Hedonism is about appetite for twisted pleasure. It is the reason the highest photojournalism awards go to photographers who made pictures of gruesome, dramatic moments. It is why for over two years now, CNN begins nearly every news bulletin with "fresh suicide bombings" in Iraq. Columbia University Journalism Professor Sig Gissler admitted it in 1989. "We have a commercial interest in catastrophe," he wrote in his book, Knocking on Death’s Door.

But, there is occasionally a utilitarian philosophy for running gruesome pictures in the news. Editors and producers will swear that all they want is the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And this is laudable. Sometimes, nothing else will do. A society just must be confronted with the consequences of motor speeding, bad roads, or religious fundamentalism. Or whatever it is that triggers tragedy. If the world wasn’t confronted with lurid pictures of death in Rwanda, Kosovo and the Sudan, ethnic cleansing would pass unnoticed.

It is because pictures can immediately shock, educate, or enlighten that journalists enjoy exploiting the visual impact. But we must draw a line in the sand.

Yes, Kenyans need to know if their universities are no longer safe, or if a rapist has moved into their neighbourhood. But news people must also deal with prioritising the events of daily life. Consider the downside of watching bloody news on a daily basis. A lot more people like Janet may begin changing channels at news time. Nobody is going to eat dinner with morbid pictures of blood and death. Worse still, bloody stories will be so commonplace that murder and rape, society’s worst vices, will start to register on our minds as nothing new.