Monday, July 03, 2006

Recent commentary: upsetting photos

Should photos of people killed by unnatural means be shown in the newspaper?

(not published in the Appleton Post-Crescent)

C'mon! Do they publish photos of people killed by natural means in the newspaper? Do they show the corpse of a man that falls 30 stories to his death? Or the corpse that's been under water for a month? I didn't think so.

This is all about those videotapes of Europeans and Americans being beheaded by islamo-fascists, isn't it? Maybe the newspapers feel left out that theirs isn't such an immediate medium. Anybody can go to the Al Jazeera web site and find beheading videos to their heart's content.

I'd say go ahead if they want to. If they can stand the heat from all of those parents who think that public broadcasters and the press should protect their children from images like those, go ahead. I'm a firm believer in the channel knob on the TV or the tuning dial on a radio or the fact that there are turnable pages in a newspaper. Those that get the vapors from the very idea that those images might be published somewhere that their precious children might see them make me gag.

But I'm pretty sure most people don't agree with me. Those sorts of images shouldn't be published. It's the responsibility of the press to see to it that we're protected from being upset too much. Bah!

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