“The latest nefarious liberal scheme: reporting.” Julian Sanchez:
Instapundit appears to think that this is a clever point:
THE PRESS WANTS TO SHOW BODIES from Katrina. It didn’t want to show bodies, or jumpers, on 9/11, for fear that doing so would inflame the public.
I can only conclude that this time around, the press thinks it’s a good thing to inflame the public. What could the difference be?
PowerLine agrees, which as a rough rule of thumb, should hint there’s something wrong with the logic there. Perhaps it’s that George Bush, Roy Nagin, and even weather patterns are unlikely to be beaten to death in the streets?
Ehh, I don’t believe that we did not show graphic images after 9/11 for fear of “inflaming” people. It was really, simply, a matter of taste. My paper actually printed a picture of a cleanly severed hand that’s been described as “horribly beautiful.” NYT photog Shannon Stapleton’s photo of the lifeless corpse of FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge being carried out of the ashes of the WTC was printed around the world. But there weren’t a lot of intact bodies out there … did people really want to see more pictures of severed body parts? Or whatever’s left of a human being after jumping from the 80th floor? (Not that I’m sure such pictures even exist. Access to Ground Zero was very tightly controlled by the authorities.)
(If you read this story about press deliberations on the use of graphic images, the risk of “inflaming the public” isn’t even mentioned. This was about good taste).
Glenn accuses Julian of being “deliberately obtuse,” but I think Glenn is guilty of that. CNN, like every media organization — and, really, every blogger — simply wants the First Amendment freedom to report freely (to the extent the logistics of a disaster zone allow). As CNN said in its brief, “It is not the place of government to replace its own internal judgment for that of a free and independent media.”
It’s not about wanting to “show bodies,” it’s about freedom; why is that so hard for Glenn Reynolds to understand?
> It’s not about wanting to “show bodies,” it’s about freedom
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2005/09/chnn-of-dead.html
Tell me how many times you’ve seen pictures like those the doc found.
Better yet, find them in any of the major media’s outlets, not conservative blogs… you know, places like Time, Newsweek, CNN, USAToday, and so on. Heck, include remotely major newspapers.
Better yet, did anyone actually print one of those shots of people who jumped out of the WTC on 911 for this 4th anniversary? Nawww. We don’t want people thinking about what really happened. Better to let people forget.
Yeah, they ran the videos of the bodies plummetting to the ground on the day they occurred — within days, though, those videos disappeared from the websites — not became something you had to search to find, or something moved behind warnings as to their graphic nature — they were Yezhoved. They ceased to exist.
Finding a graphic picture or video of a beheading, though, is like finding a speck of gold dust in a Saharan sand dune.
Yeah, they don’t want to show us those pics because they’re “disturbing”.
Bodies exhumed after burial suffering from the kind of bloating that occurs after spending days floating in the water — those are just for freedom’s sake.
Pull the other one.
We’re talking about a media which can’t even write about the #$%#$%^^$%#$^^@#^$%^%^@#$^$^&%$^ Pieces of #^$%%$@$ at BESLAN as the TERRORISTS they are/were. These useless turds shot children IN THE BACK. They were cowards and murderers, nothing less… but not to the media — No, to the media they are “insurgents” and “militants”.
Bull F’ing Sh**.
Call them what they are —
Murderers.
Child Killers.
*Terrorists*.
We need to stop pussyfooting around what these people represent, which is the destruction of everything we believe in. The subjugation of our children and our children’s children.
They represent DEATH, Derek.
As long as the media is only interested in DEATHs they can bash over Bush’s head, then the media is PREJUDICED and unreliable.
Those’re the only bodies they want to show. Pitiful and unfortunate though it may be.
Nick, CNN won its lawsuit. Tell me how many times you’ve seen ghastly photos of grinning corpses on TV, or in the newspaper? None, because that’s not the kind of gore you ever seen in the mass media. We do run pictures of bodies, but like this or this — bodies covered with tarpaulins, or face down in the water … disturbing, but not gory.
I can’t remember the last time the media printed four-year-old photos (except for file photo headshots, such as in an obituary). We’re news, not olds … you won’t see any Katrina body photos in 2009 (or 2006), either.
By the way … the pictures of falling bodies are … almost antiseptic, really. They don’t show the horror of that day very well, in my mind, failing to capture the scale of what happened. There were many, many more powerful photos that I saw in the mainstream media during that time.
And really, I think all the bloggers who posted those jumper pictures last week were almost being disrespectful to the people who died that day … That was not the way to honor their memory. There are a lot of other, more respectful ways of showing what we lost that day … photos of the people as they lived, not how they died.
Also, you won’t see photos like these in the mainstream press either.
By the way, I’m not sure who you think didn’t call the Beslan terrorists, “terrorists.” The Times certainly used that word … and I wrote this story profiling Shamil Basayev that was headlined “Meet face of evil behild horror.”
1) Derek, there has been a consistent avoidance of the use of the word Terrorists to refer to obvious murderers, torturers, and other “really nice guys” so common to “the opposition”. If the actions of these people got one TENTH the attention that the idiots at Abu Ghirab got, there’d be a lot less claims of bias.
And then there’s a piece by Neo-neocon:
http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/2005/09/placing-blame-thoughts-on-first.html
But if you read the [Boston] Globe AP article carefully, you’ll note something very strange. If ever people had earned the right to be called “terrorists” (and much worse), the Beslan perpetrators had fully earned that right. And yet the AP seems, once again, to bend over backwards to avoid the word. Sure, the word “terrorists” appears five times in the article, but most of these are quotes from Putin’s speech.
No, it’s not about the Times, but there is very much a reluctance to use the word there, too. It’s not just the Times, or the Globe — it’s pretty much all the liberal mainstream press: Allow me to quote LGF —
Here’s an AFP story about the anniversary of the horrific slaughter of children in Beslan, Russia, by Islamic terrorists from Chechnya—in which the word “Islam” does not appear: Minute of silence marks anniversary of Beslan hostage bloodbath. — See, they were just anti-war militants, and all those children and hostages just perished. Somehow. In a tragedy.
2) “By the way … the pictures of falling bodies are … almost antiseptic, really.” Then why are they so difficult to find using internet search engines?
3) Further, does it occur to you that perhaps by “sanitizing” the actions of these sociopaths that you make them seem more approachable, more reasonable, more understandable to the average bozo out there, particularly the ones for whom “all we are saying, is give peace a chance”? These people just Don’t Get It — the forces of Islamic Fanaticism DON’T WANT PEACE. They want us all reduced to, at best, dhimmitude and DEAD otherwise. They want us ALL to be second class citizens and our wives and daughters to be third-class, and available for them to abuse and rape and beat for the slightest provocation, intentional or unintentional.
Perhaps what is needed IS a dose of REALITY as to truly what kind of brutality and inhumanity these people stand for and believe in.
Perhaps if the USA had known earlier what was going on in those Death Camps there might be more than 6000 Polish Jews left alive.
Sometimes graphic pictures ARE called for, Derek.
Nick, I almost think you’re almost being deliberately stupid here.
1) That AP story did call it a terrorist attack, and I can point you to many other AP and AFP articles that called the hostage-takers, “terrorists.” If anyone drew the conclusion from that AFP story that the Beslan “children and hostages just perished. Somehow. In a tragedy,” they are really too dense to be reading newspapers.
Were the Beslan militants, “Islamic terrorists,” or “Chechen terrorists”? I mean, do they claim to be motivated by Islam? I’m not so sure that they do.
I find this word-by-word, nit-picky parsing of individual news stories to be very tiresome.
2) Again — are you being dense? Mass media websites put their photos and stories behind a paid firewall after 30 days or so. Unless a blogger has chosen to copy the photos, they’re gone unless you have access to something like the AP Photoarchive.
3) “Sometimes graphic pictures ARE called for.” Is this something you’d be willing to apply across the board, or just when it suits your politics?