Everyone knows what Cheney said. No one could deny it was news. So print it.
Then there are the "tasteless" photos that are routinely withheld from printed pages and TV screens in the United States: sexual images like Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" and gruesome pictures of crime victims. America's namby-pambyness is an outlier. In Latin America, photos of 9/11 jumpers ran on the front pages of major newspapers. But in the U.S., 17 years later, the images are still scrubbed from public view. Even a sculpture based on those photos was removed from public viewing as too controversial.
It's not like we don't know these images exist. We saw them in live coverage on 9/11. Those who didn't watch them then have heard about it. The media has decided that we're too sensitive to see our own history. Even if you agree with their editorial decision, doesn't it make you wonder what else they're keeping from us?
Images of 9/11 jumpers underscored the horror of the day. Censorship doesn't respect the dead. It whitewashes their agony.
The counterfactual argument, like airing ISIS snuff videos that might encourage the creation of more such imagery, is powerful. Even with such disgusting material, though, we should err on the side of the news and the public's right to know. The alternative, the nanny media we have now, cannot be trusted and feeds into the demagogic framing of "fake news."
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