If you live in Toronto, the big news event of the day yesterday (and I'm sure this made several national newscasts), was the police shooting of an armed hostage taker. My colleague Peter Murphy reported on this event for CTV National News. At that link, you can also find lots of video broadcast by our Toronto affiliate, CFTO. (If that link doesn't work, head here and look at the right hand side of the screen for all the video links) Our cameras and cameras from other outlets in Toronto were on the scene at Toronto's Union Station well before a police sniper fired the shot that blew apart the hostage taker's head. A TV news crew from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in town for another feature, was looking down on the drama from their rooms in the Royal York Hotel across the street from Union. So this event was filmed from several angles by several crews many of which caught, in a very graphic medium close-up, the sniper's bullet entering and exiting the man's head. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of commuters and those in the surrounding office towers saw the event and the killing. And yet, no broadcaster or print outlet I know of broadcast or published a photo which showed the actual moment of the man's death. If you watch the video of our piece (there's a link to the video above), you see the man and his hostage and then, just as you hear the sound of the rifle, the frame is frozen. The next image you see is a long-shot of the man lying on the pavement with police officers converging on his now lifeless body. Having seen the unedited footage collected by our crews at the scene, I think this was the right way to treat this. But some bloggers at a recent Toronto conference on Participatory Journalism, who believe Big Media has too much power, say things like this should be shown on TV, that we are censoring by omission. At this conference, we were talking about the video from Iraq that showed the beheading of the American hostage. That video ended up, in all its gory detail, on the Internet. So far as I know, the gory details from yesterday's incident in Toronto have not been shown anywhere. (Please correct me if I'm wrong) Is that the right call? I think it is.