gory. The images of those killed in the town of Haditha, whose deaths were themselves the point of controversy, were always displayed, for example, wrapped in blankets (just like the victims of American car crashes), shocking in number, ambiguous in presentation. While we hear that large numbers of bodies have turned up after having been beheaded, tortured, or mutilated, and the descriptions of the state those bodies are in is often quite graphic in the print press, those are not images we are likely to see in the American press anytime soon. No matter how graphic the description in the story, those descriptions have not been—and I predict, will not be—accompanied by pictures of any bodies that have been obviously decapitated, where the marks from the electric drill used as a torture device are visible, nor will a mainstream media outlet any day soon publish a picture of a corpse whose eyes have been gouged out, despite the fact that reports of such corpses have appeared in these outlets on a regular basis. Even the photographs from abu Ghraib, although they were published and displayed in the American media repeatedly, were the same small set from a much larger collection simply being shown over and over again. The reason is that the vast majority of those images were too graphic to pass the fairly narrow parameters of what is considered acceptable by the American press.
The kinds of dilemmas confronted by the press when making decisions about which images to publish and how to use them, particularly in the case of hostage situations, were made especially clear in the case of Nicholas Berg. Berg, a young entrepreneur seeking his fortune in Iraq, was the first American whose beheading was videotaped[1] and made available worldwide via the Internet by Zarqawi's group (many believing
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- ↑ Daniel Pearl, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was lured to an interview in Pakistan, kidnapped and decapitated. There was essentially no serious discussion or consideration given to the idea that any images would be shown from the video by mainstream media outlets, and only CBS did so. The most controversial choice at that point was one made by a single, alternative weekly, which provided its readers with a hyperlink to the video. See "Freedom to Choose: Why We Linked to the Video Released by Daniel Pearl's Murderers," The Boston Phoenix, June 6–13, 2002, thephoenix,com, available from www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/editorial/documents/02299081.htm.
