The images that shocked America

MANY major newspapers ran graphic photos yesterday of charred bodies of Americans killed in Iraq, while the images were largely shunned by American television as being too graphic.

Eight photographs of the Fallujah attack, including the corpses being dragged in the streets and hanging from a bridge, were transmitted on Wednesday by The Associated Press with an advisory to editors to “note graphic content”.

An AP photo of the bridge scene with the bodies clearly visible was used on the front page of The New York Times.

“You can’t shy away from the news, and the news in this case is the indignities visited upon the victims and the jubilation of the crowd,” said Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor.

“At the same time you have to be mindful of the pain the pictures would cause to families and the potential revulsion of readers and children.”

Similar images were on the front pages of The Miami Herald and the Boston Herald. The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, which has a large military presence, ran a bridge photo on an inside page. An accompanying note told readers though the photos were disturbing, the editors felt they were necessary to give a full accounting of the killings.

Fox News Channel planned to limit its images to shots of the burning vehicles and to shots of joyous crowds in Fallujah.

In London, Channel 4 News broadcast an electronically-blurred body dragged through the street.

Paris’s LCI television station showed footage of the bodies dragged and hanging, without blurring them.

Arab television station Al Arabiya used a filter to blur the images of the bodies, but Al-Jazeera did not.