PressEthic

A warning: this is pretty horrific stuff. There is, for example, an image of a man in the drivers seat of a car, slumped over beneath a bullet-scarred windshield, his scalp completely torn to shreds. He tried to run an American checkpoint, the caption says.

The captions, which are authored by soldiers, are as gut-wrenching as the pictures. As the Eastbay Express reports, there was a “picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails.” "What every Iraqi should look like," the caption says.

Even more jarring is that, as the EE also reports, no major American dailies have picked up the story (an accurate statement, according to a quick search through LexisNexis and Google), while Europeans papers—particularly in Italy and France—are all over it. Chris Thompson, who wrote the piece for EE, concluded that “perhaps no one wants to give [the porn site administrator] Chris Wilson more publicity, or daily editors are too sensitive about being viewed as unpatriotic. Or perhaps the story is just too ugly to contemplate.”

It’s hard to imagine editors feeling that insecure. It’s equally tough to imagine that the story is “too ugly” to cover. Abu-Ghraib was far uglier, and yet that was big, big news. Granted, this story doesn’t implicate the military in illegal or foul play, and thus it doesn’t bare the same weight as Abu-Ghraib. But it's certianly a story. That said, I can’t do much better than Thompson—except to say that it would inflame Iraqis and Muslims (as many of the captions are racist), as well as terrorists and potential terrorists, as the White House has said all along about why it won't release more Abu-Ghraib images. But the press’ job isn’t to toe the Joint Chiefs of Staffs’ line. Nor is it supposed to avoid an important story—even if it’s as ugly and controversial as this one.