Grisly images tested boundaries for news media

WASHINGTON -- Every war or disaster contains moments that become defining images: a napalmed girl or a gun to the head in Vietnam, the body of a US soldier dragged through a Somalian street.

It is not clear whether the 80 seconds of video yesterday showing images of charred American bodies being beaten and dangled from the steelwork of a bridge over the Euphrates River will come to define the war in Iraq.

But once again, broadcasters and news executives were torn between a question of taste and the demand to give viewers information that could affect the course of history.

"War is a horrible thing. It is about killing," ABC News "Nightline" executive producer Leroy Sievers said in an unusual message to the program's e-mail subscribers discussing the issues posed by yesterday's killings. "If we try to avoid showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make it too easy to go to war again."

The video from Fallujah, Iraq, yesterday was so graphic, so horrific, that US television networks held back in their displays, wrestling through the day yesterday with just how much to show on their news programs.

Some television and newspaper websites, including Latimes.Com, offered Associated Press video of the grisly killings of four American contractors in Iraq but warned visitors that it contained "graphic, violent images."

Globe editors determined last night that the content of the pictures was too graphic for Page 1 use, but felt that the events were of such a nature that they deserved to be depicted in the Globe. One photograph was published on an inside page that showed the remains of one victim surrounded by a crowd on the streets of Fallujah.

The events yesterday -- and the responses they provoked -- were bluntly reminiscent of the downing of a Black Hawk helicopter in Somalia in 1993, followed by images of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

It was not clear yesterday whether the graphic video of the deaths of American contractors would alter public opinion or the prosecution of the war in Iraq. But that possibility confronted policy makers and news executives across the country.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said that with such attacks, "the enemies of freedom, the enemies of the Iraqi people, are trying to shake our will. But they cannot. We will not be intimidated."

But recognizing the impact images have had in the past, he urged caution in the use of images and told reporters, "I hope everybody acts responsibly in their coverage."

The decisions could have a political impact. While showing the images could erode support for the war, not showing them could have an opposite impact.

Acting "responsibly" and not showing troubling scenes, some observers said, could have the effect of helping the White House maintain public confidence for the war effort.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, said the pictures from the attack could anger viewers, or "engender disenchantment about the war."

The administration should be acutely concerned about the impact of images of atrocity against Americans, said Gordon Adams, director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and a former Clinton administration official.

"Pictures like this are megaphones," Adams said. "They are megaphones about being an American and being in Iraq. The security situation in Iraq has not been solved. The policy has ended up making targets of Americans, and this brings that home."

During the Vietnam War, Associated Press photographs of a Viet Cong guerrilla being executed on a Saigon street, and of a naked girl burned by napalm became two of the lasting images of the Vietnam war.

But with a generation of experience, news executives yesterday found the decision-making no easier.

Initially, several networks decided, in the words of a Fox News Channel spokesman, that the video was "too graphic to show on television." But as the day wore on, some began using some of the more graphic images, even showing blackened, barely recognizable bodies hanging from the bridge.

"It's impossible to tell the story without using some of the footage, but we will use it judiciously," said Jim Murphy, executive producer of CBS Evening News. "You need to see the context in which it all happened -- the hundreds or thousands of people dancing, mutilating, dragging, cheering, parading, celebrating this grotesque act."

But Murphy said some of the video was "unbelievably gruesome," adding, "I don't see what purpose there is to showing that."

The network's news program electronically blurred some of the most gruesome images and a reporter said in a voice-over that the images were "so horrid, we chose not to show you" the the most gruesome ones.

ABC News also electronically blurred images of bodies in its evening broadcast. A spokesman said the network reviewed the video "frame by frame to decide what can be used."

At NBC, news executives said they tried to balance its news obligation with the need to "be sensitive to our viewers."

CNN began airing more and more graphic footage as the day wore on and the story became more familiar.