Mindich himself gives one argument for promoting the tape of Pearl's killing: It is the only way to appreciate the magnitude of what we are up against. "If there is anything that should galvanize every non-Jew-hater in the world -- of whatever faith or of no faith -- against the perpetrator and supporters of those who committed this unspeakable murder -- it should be viewing this video," he writes. Others, including Salon's Samuel G. Freedman (who I have known and admired for years), amplify Mindich's argument, comparing the tape to the famous Vietnam photo of a naked and burned girl fleeing American napalm, or the first explicit photos of Nazi death camps.

All of which might make sense as an argument to rile up a complacent nation, if Americans remained unconcerned about the threat posed by Pearl's violent, fundamentalist, anti-Semitic killers. In the cost-benefit analysis of media, shocking an apathetic public into action can justify a lot of tough decisions.

But is that kind of genuine shock value justified here? Since Sept. 11, the American public has been drenched with images of flaming skyscrapers, the sight and sound of bodies falling to the sidewalk, the bloody aftermath of suicide bombings in Israel. It hardly took Pearl's video to convince most Americans, and much of the rest of the world, that al-Qaida and allied violent sects represent a real threat. Somehow the nation stood behind President Bush's decision to oust the Taliban without viewing Pearl's decapitation.

That famous Vietnam picture had meaning because of a raging debate over the morality of American bombing and the justification for the war's escalation. The Pearl tape touches no such divide -- certainly not in the United States, the only audience likely to seek out a Boston alternative weekly. Photos of Auschwitz documented unprecedented atrocity on a mass scale that literally could not be believed. The Pearl murder video accomplishes no such documentation; its details have been published, and excerpts of Pearl's coerced statements broadcast, for months. The Phoenix upped the ante on brutality, but added nothing to public knowledge or debate.

I'm even more troubled by another argument made by some of Mindich's defenders: that the sensibilities of victims -- like Daniel Pearl's family -- are not the problem of reporters. Something called news value trumps the desire of Pearl's family to keep circulation of his murder video to a minimum, just as it does when reporters knock on the doors of "ordinary" survivors of high-profile crimes.

I'll have to confess that this is not an abstract issue for me. Eight years ago I was stabbed by a psychopath in a New Haven cafe, along with six other people, and a local television news crew captured the image of my bleeding body on a gurney. The repeated replaying of that footage on television, the pursuit of some victims by aggressive camera crews, still stand out for the distress they engendered in my family and myself, for months afterward. On the other hand, some reporters handled the story with the greatest respect, which went a long way toward convincing me that my profession was not hopelessly cynical.

The idea that tossing the desires of Pearl's family into the ashcan is "just what journalists do" is only a cover for indiscriminate National Enquirer logic. In fact, some reporters and editors years ago began challenging the old "if it bleeds, it leads" sensibility with careful judgments about the impact of news decisions on victims. Few newspapers now print the names of rape victims -- once commonplace. In televised murder trials, gruesome crime-scene photos are usually kept off-camera and off the front pages. To claim that dismissing the concerns of the Pearls is "just our job" disrespects these complex ethical decisions made in newsrooms every day.

We journalists too often use the First Amendment as cover for shrugging off the consequences of our news choices on the individuals we cover. Yet the extraordinary power of stories and images to injure their subjects, to rob those depicted of dignity and to stimulate the worst human impulses, is one of the reasons freedom of the press is such a high-stakes commitment for a democracy.

From the Oklahoma City bombing and now al-Qaida's attacks, the American press has learned a lot about dignified and respectful reporting on victims of atrocity -- think of the New York Times' "Portraits of Grief" series. Hard decisions about which images to broadcast and print will emerge with greater frequency as the anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches. But far from clarifying the issue, the Boston Phoenix's promotion of the Daniel Pearl murder video -- publicizing a paranoid propaganda tape and encouraging voyeurism at the expense of a dead reporter's family -- only muddies the difficult choices to come .

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