The current Time magazine, whose images are also clearly centered on stylized portraits of the U.S. military in action, did a far better job of communicating a complete picture of the conflict, including the grisly effects of the battle. Time ran several large, haunting, even graphic photographs -- one of a badly disfigured Iraqi boy in a rundown hospital who lost his arms, and his whole family, during a neighborhood firefight. Another two-page photo spread featured an aging, inconsolable Iraqi man sitting amid the rubble of what used to be his home.

Time also ran a picture of a dead Iraqi civilian, a farmer who refused to stop his car at a checkpoint. "The Iraqi man was lying across the cab with his feet hanging out the passenger side door," Time correspondent Alex Perry wrote, "his head snapped back, a diamond-shaped entry wound just below his right eye; the fourth finger on his right hand had been shot off, and there was a large patch of blood under his right arm."

Time's picture and graphic description highlights another peculiar press standard, the reluctance to show death and severe injury. If it must be shown, the U.S. media will show foreigners first, and then, as a last resort, Americans. For instance, this week when several foreign journalists were killed after the U.S. shelled a hotel that many call home in Baghdad, virtually all the American TV news channels, and scores of print outlets, ran images of frantic friends dragging the wrapped body of a injured photographer through the halls of the hotel in search of medical help. He later died. But the war has produced no standout image of a gravely wounded or dead American.

Literally from the first day of the war, American cable news outlets made clear how they were going to deal with the politically explosive issue of civilian casualties in a war to liberate Iraq. Just hours after the U.S. launched its opportunity bombing strike on Saddam, hoping to kill him before the full-on invasion began, CNN scored its first mini-coup; it had a reporter who spoke Arabic inside a local hospital where some wounded civilians had been taken. As she began to describe the scene, which included some injured children, the CNN anchor quickly cut away from the report for less emotional discussion about the military strike.

Fast-forward three weeks into the war and U.S. television coverage seems almost immune to the notion of covering, let alone caring about, civilian bombing victims. Take the most recent assassination attempt on Saddam, where a U.S. bombing attack left a 60-foot-deep crater in the Baghdad neighborhood where he was said to have been Monday night. The attack raised serious ethical questions, such as whether the U.S. military, which has insisted it's doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, should have dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on a Baghdad neighborhood, damaging 20 homes and dozens of shops, and doing so on a single eyewitness tip that Saddam may have been nearby. "When the broken body of the 20-year-old woman was brought out torso first, then her head," the AP reported, "her mother started crying uncontrollably, then collapsed."

But American talking heads, busy playing the what-if game about Saddam's whereabouts, never seemed to give the issue any thought. Certainly they did not linger on images of the hellacious human carnage left in the aftermath.

Instead, CNN and others focused on the technology, airing interviews with the B-1B pilot responsible for the hit. Patched in by the Pentagon for a celebratory conference call with reporters, the pilot, whose mission according to AP may have killed 14 Iraqi civilians, including seven children, recounted how his target may have been "the big one." Many analysts now believe Saddam survived the attack, though no one seems to know for sure.

Presumably, it serves the interest of the Bush administration -- or any administration waging a war -- to limit the publication or broadcast of war's most horrific visions. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then even one photo of a dead child can move an ambivalent viewer solidly into the antiwar camp. By limiting and sanitizing the range of issues, the press may be reflexively trying to avoid charges that it is delivering antiwar propaganda in a news package.

The early days of the war brought a telling example: When several Americans were captured and taken as POWs, Al-Jazeera aired their images. But instead of treating the pictures as breaking news, most U.S. TV news organizations acquiesced to the Pentagon, which wanted to first contact the soldiers' families before the images were aired.

As for the portion of the tape that showed dead POWs, ABC News President David Westin vowed never to air the pictures because "they're not newsworthy," while CBS News President Andrew Heyward warned against showing unnecessarily gruesome pictures or anything that could be used for propaganda purposes.

That's a dramatic departure from the standard used just 10 years ago, when most major American TV press outlets -- CNN, ABC, and CBS -- all aired a grotesque news clip showing a bloated U.S. soldier's corpse being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, after rebels there shot down American helicopters. The incident became the basis for the book and movie, "Black Hawk Down." Back then, the press did not wait for the soldier's family to be notified, nor did they worry about propaganda implications.

Today's climate raises the question whether there is now any circumstance under which the American press would show images of American soldiers killed during wartime. The answer may very well be no. Even if it wanted to, the press today can't take its traditional pictures of flag-draped military coffins, since the Pentagon has banned journalists from the airbase in Germany where bodies are flown.

During the controversy over the POW images, U.S. Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy commander for the war, urged media outlets not to run the footage. Nonetheless, he conceded to reporters: "I don't think that these pictures will damage either the psychology of our soldiers, morale of our soldiers, or the steadfastness of our government or the resolve of our people. We're a pretty tough people."

He's right. And the American press should start treating its wartime consumers that way, even if it means confronting them with realities that some might call unpleasant.

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