Graphic images flood out of Syria. Why no world uproar?

A long, tense public session in the UN Security Council yesterday on a resolution calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down and allow a transitional government to be formed can be summed up with one word: "Nyet."

That appeared to be the position of veto-wielding UNSC member Russia. The NATO intervention in Libya, which tipped the scales of that country's rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi, infuriated Russia, which says it's taking a hard line now to prevent a repeat.

Following Syria's war from abroad can lead to a day filled with horrors. Social media networks are filled with daily footage of the carnage uploaded by amateur cameramen and pictures of the dead and dying – men, women, and children all. But the excitement of 2011 about the Arab uprisings internationally has started to wane. At the start of last year, it seemed the whole region could be transformed with nary a shot being fired. Now that optimism has been replaced with an almost numbing wash of pictures and videos that, due to their very ubiquity, are losing their power to mobilize international action.

Years ago, when I went to work for the Far Eastern Economic Review, my boss John McBeth summed up successful magazine writing in two words. "Think pictures," he told me then. And he was right. If a story could be built around arresting images, it always had much more impact.

In the late 1990s, I covered the end of Indonesia's long occupation in East Timor. Many of the Timorese activists and rebel fighters who had opposed Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975 and annexation of the former Portuguese colony were convinced that a single piece of footage had tipped the international scales in their favor. In 1991, a British journalist going by the name Max Stahl (his real name is Christopher Wenner) had sneaked into the territory and was filming a protest march at Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili when a confrontation with Indonesian soldiers devolved into a massacre.

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