"A lot of that came across as apologizing for having to show readers the images, and that's not appropriate," says Janet Weaver, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training institute in Florida. "There were real contortions over the Fallujah pictures, and it showed how very uncomfortable [the press] remains with graphic images of war violence." (On Saturday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a similar type of editor's note when it published photos of abused Iraqi prisoners.)

The mostly restrained approach after Fallujah contrasted sharply with the way the horrific pictures from Somalia were handled; then the press saw clear news value in disturbing images and gave them extensive and prominent play. Several major dailies ran the close-up Mogadishu photo on Page 1; both Time and Newsweek gave the image big play inside; and CNN, ABC and CBS all aired grotesque news clips. Back then, the press did not wait for the soldiers' families to be notified, nor did they worry about the political implications for the Clinton administration.

Wrestling with how best to use recent Fallujah photographs, Golon and other Time editors went back to see how the magazine had handled the Somalia situation and were stunned at how graphic the images the magazine published in 1993 were. "We couldn't believe the things we ran then -- a full-page image of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets. It's shocking. And it's shocking that in just 11 years' time we could find that shocking," she says. "There's a completely different mindset today. It's a reflection of the culture and the fact that the country has become more conservative in the last 11 years. We have a very conservative president."

McGinnis at CBS agrees that the network today would "be less inclined to air" Somalia-type footage. CBS's "Evening News" refused to run the Fallujah videotape, and anchor Dan Rather told viewers the images were too gruesome even for adult viewing. But Keller of the Times says if the paper received a photo of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of an Iraqi city, it would be "on the table for serious consideration" for publication in the newspaper.

Within newsrooms there is also a debate about taste: how far journalists can and should go to illustrate the consequences of war without offending their viewers and readers, a consideration related to circulation and ratings. "I don't think networks are scared of being labeled as liberal," says Judith Matloff, a journalism professor at Columbia University who teaches a course on war coverage. "They're more concerned about losing audiences by showing something very grisly. They have to be aware of angry calls coming in as well as their need to make money. You can't separate that from this issue."

"My newspaper is going into family households," says Baron at the Globe. "We don't put a lot of gruesome pictures on the front page or blood on the front page. We get sharp reactions against it, whether it's a war or a car accident."

But MacArthur argues that reporting on wars -- especially preemptive wars -- and reporting on traffic accidents are not the same thing and require very different guidelines. "War coverage is a matter of public interest," he says. "Americans have a right to know what's being done in their name. And one consequence of war is corpses. Unless you're showing corpses, you're not showing the consequences of war. Americans can't make informed decision about what to do in Iraq by censoring the reality of Iraq. It's irrational."

Peter Tobia, a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Inquirer who was on assignment in Iraq for four months last year, thinks the cruel month of April marked a turning point in how the press is adjusting, and making more realistic, its war coverage. "It's taken a while for the media to become more forceful and to show and tell the real side of what's going on," he says. "I think they were trying to figure out how long the war was going to last. Was it going to be over fast, like the administration said? Now they're saying, 'OK, let's not play games anymore. Let's tell it like it is.'"

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