On the day when the heart of the Danish footballer Christian Eriksen stood still for a short time, when we sat petrified in front of the television, the image direction of the international TV signal, which supplies the world with images of the European Football Championship, really got going.

The camera pointed to the Danish players who, on the initiative of team captain Simon Kjær and his teammate Thomas Delaney, immediately rallied around Eriksen, who was lying on the ground.

The director, who chooses which image is to be seen everywhere, did not take this shielding as an unmistakable appeal to distance and decency;

Instead, one of the more than thirty cameras in the stadium kept zooming in on the group of players in order to capture a few fragmented images between the bodies, arms and legs.

Before that, the director had put Christian Eriksen's partner in the stands and followed her when she was inside, where the bodies of Kjær and goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel offered her protection that the cameras would not grant her.

Voyeurs in the stadium

There was something obscene about how the cameras just wouldn't let up. And it betrayed an underdeveloped sense that the ZDF unmoved continued to broadcast the picture of the world director. The image makers' defense was accordingly lame and poor: “We showed the grief and despair of the people, the players, the staff and the audience,” said the international director, the French Jean-Jacques Amsellem. “We also sensed a unity at that moment of greatest concern. That had to be communicated. I don't call that voyeurism. "

Unfortunately, he didn't tell the French sports magazine L'Équipe how he calls it.

But he added eagerly, “The instructions were clear.

We were told not to show him any close-up or cardiac massage.

But that it is not a problem to show emotions.

If someone had instructed me to stick to the long shot, I would have done that. ”Apparently these instructions, which the producer received from UEFA, could be understood as blurred zoom images in which even laypeople can easily still perform the typical movements during a cardiac massage recognize that they are completely in order, because there is no problem with "emotions".

UEFA orders what is appropriate

The ZDF also washed its hands as usual in innocence. Sports director Thomas Fuhrmann said: “ZDF handled the tragic incident at the Denmark - Finland match responsibly. Béla Réthy reported sensitively from the stadium, the colleagues in the studio found the right words. Nor can I criticize UEFA’s international direction. When the extent of the serious injury became apparent, there were no close-ups or other unsuitable images. "

Anyone who takes these speech bubbles seriously has to assume that a shaky zoom in on a heart massage is appropriate if the UEFA directors order it. With so much apologetics, it didn't help that Béla Réthy, who is rarely at ball level and sees things that nobody else sees, didn't babble around his head this time. It didn't even help that the 2014 world champions, Per Mertesacker and Christoph Kramer, found the right words full of empathy in the studio and that even the moderator Jochen Breyer, who tended to be inclined to constantly ingratiate himself, appropriately articulated the helplessness that had seized everyone at that moment. Unfortunately, however, they all appeared on a station that seemed overwhelmed by such a situation.