Attitudinal Beliefs

one man's blantant censorship is another's respect for the dead and their families. from the article: "Let's not make a common decency issue into a censorship issue," Tapscott said. "Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and see their dead uncle on the front page. That's just common decency."

Taking photographs and running photographs on the front page are two different issues.

Yes, editors should be tasteful in what they run, especially in these days and weeks immediately following the tragedy. But to deny access to journalists who need to document this event so future generations won't repeat the same mistakes is absolutely censorship.

I agree.

It's a respect to families thing. Local TV news stations have a no local dead bodies policy -- which pretty much means the entire U.S. Since they (usually) don't have correspondents overseas, they leave it up to the network producers to decide what will be shown on the feeds.

As far as SEEING the dead bodies is concerned: For example, I didn't NEED to see the footage of Nick Berg being beheaded to know that that was his fate. And after seeing it, I wished I hadn't.

Pictures of dead bodies are taken all the time. The coroner's office takes them. The police takes them. It is my opinion that they should almost NEVER be run in print. Case in point, would you like to have a four-year-old ask you in the grocery store, "Daddy, why is that guy dead?"

I think people have a right NOT to have to see certain things.

It looks pretty clear to me that the intent in taking the pics was not to document the event but to run them on the front page.

From the article: "It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story...You cannot report on the disaster and give the public a realistic idea of how horrible it is if you don't see that there are bodies as well...How is the world going to look at us if we go into their part of the world and we broadcast these images and we do not allow ourselves to look at such images when they're right in our own midst?"

In other words, just more of the media's blatant disregard for people's dignity in favor of ratings.

As for Republicans being the "small government" party, there is no small govt. party. Dems, Republicans, Green Party, all rely on big government to exist.

Be that as it may, FEMA is not supposed to be a partisan organization. Yes, the head of FEMA was appointed by Bush, but if FEMA is playing partisan games, and I don't think they are, then they are stepping out of bounds.

Bill,

The reason you didn't need to see Berg's video to know what happened is that someone else saw it and told you.

I'm not saying that everyone needs to see the photographs, but the photographs do need to be taken.