Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp (9/4/09) has an update on U.S. papers' "mixed reaction to the controversial Associated Press photo distributed today of a Marine who died in combat in Afghanistan last month."

The picture's inclusion in "a group of images taken by AP photographer Julie Jacobson" predictably was "blasted" by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, whose censure came via "a formal letter of complaint."

Strupp reports that

the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times ran the photo on its website with an AP story about the images, while the Commercial Appeal in Memphis provided an online photo gallery of all of Jacobson's images from the coverage. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin also carried the photo.

The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., also ran the image, with a lengthy editorial explaining why. It said, in part: "Not all news outlets will choose to publish the picture, distributed by the Associated Press. We feel we owe it to our readers to explain why we have decided to use the image."

While the Intelligencer also felt the need to declare themselves "entirely in support of the war against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq," Strupp's list of those entirely "withholding the shot of [Lance Cpl. Joshua] Bernard being fatally wounded" is long--including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Boston Herald, Stars and Stripes and the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, which further ingratiated itself with Robert Gates' propaganda machine by condemning such evidence of the reality of war as "in poor taste."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Self-Censorship to Official Censorship: Ban on Images of Wounded GIs Raises No Media Objections" (3–4/07) by Pat Arnow.

Hiroshima in America author Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher, 8/6/09) has taken a hard look at "the suppression of film and photographic evidence of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" that "would play a key role as America embarked on a nuclear era with severe impact still with us today."

He gives us a history of how, "in the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan 64 years ago and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings":

This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years, all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades....

More recently, [compiler of the U.S. films Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel] McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.

Bringing us up to date with the fact that "after 60 years at least a small portion of that footage reached part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful" Original Child Bomb documentary, Mitchell says that "Americans who saw were finally able to fully judge for themselves" exactly "why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race--and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today."

Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Mitchell on Hiroshima" (8/5/05). And see Extra! Update: "Media to Smithsonian: History Is Bunk" (4/95)

Reporting that "the Obama administration has recently paid a lot of lip service to freedom of the press, particularly around the case of Iranian-American journalist Roxanna Saberi, who was released May 11 from an Iranian prison," Jeremy Scahill asks (Rebel Reports, 5/26/09) the simple question, "If Iran Freed Roxanna Saberi, Why Won't the U.S. Release Journalist Ibrahim Jassam?"

Part of the answer might lie in a media environment heeding former Col. Ralph Peters' recent "essay for a leading neocon group calling for future U.S. military attacks on media outlets and journalists" along with "censorship" and "news blackouts."

Of course, Scahill is savvy enough to point out that "what Col. Peters is advocating is not new"--"It is already a de facto U.S. policy to target journalists":

The U.S. has consistently attacked journalists and media organizations in modern wars. In the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, General Wesley Clark, then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, ordered an airstrike on Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers, including make-up artists and technical staff, an action Amnesty International labeled a “war crime.” Richard Holbrooke, who is currently Obama’s point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan, praised that bombing at the time.

The U.S. bombed Al Jazeera in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, attacked it multiple times in the 2003 Iraq invasion, and killed Jazeera correspondent Tarek Ayoub. On April 8, 2003, a U.S. Abrams tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, home and office to more than 100 unembedded international journalists operating in Baghdad at the time. The shell smashed into the fifteenth-floor Reuters office, killing two cameramen, Reuters' Taras Protsyuk and José Couso of Spain's Telecinco....

Last week, a Spanish judge reinstated charges against three U.S. soldiers in Couso’s killing, citing new evidence, including eyewitness testimony contradicting official U.S. claims that soldiers were responding to enemy fire from the hotel. One year ago, former Army Sergeant Adrienne Kinne told Democracy Now! she saw the Palestine Hotel on a military target list and said she frequently intercepted calls from journalists staying there.

All of which makes it less than surprising that, as Scahill tells us, "the U.S. military continues to hold journalists as prisoners without charges or rights in...Iraq. Ibrahim Jassam, a cameraman and photographer for Reuters has been a U.S. prisoner in Iraq since last September despite an Iraqi court's order last year that he be freed." See the FAIR Press Release: "Is Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?" (4/10/03)

Media reporter DeWayne Wickham sees (USA Today, 3/3/09) the new Pentagon rules allowing photography of U.S. casualty coffins as "just the silver lining" around the dark cloud of a fact that "our free press is still being stage-managed by those who run the wars." That the new regulations permit photos only "if the family of the war dead give permission" has Wickham acknowledging that "this will be a gut-wrenching decision for some families. But news organizations shouldn't let such a policy--or the family's wishes--dictate how they cover war news":

This month marks the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war. Nearly 4,300 U.S. military personnel have been killed there since fighting began in 2003. The war in Afghanistan started in October 2001 and has taken more than 650 [U.S.] lives. Those losses might have been smaller, and the U.S. involvement shorter, if newspapers hadn't given in to the Pentagon's effort to sanitize coverage of this nation's wars.

The pictures of war are an integral part of the storytelling of these great conflicts. And in a democratic society, people have a right to see these images and newspapers have an obligation to show readers both the good and bad that combat produces. That's because the cost of war--though borne most heavily by those who are killed and their grieving relatives--is exacted from all of us. We all have a right to know, and visualize, the ultimate price that some of the men and women America sends into battle are forced to pay.

"By allowing the Pentagon to establish the rules for photographing the most telling evidence of the human cost of war," Wickham tells us, "news organizations have abdicated a significant part of their reporting duty to those who manage America's war machine." If U.S. corporate media are this irresponsible about reportage of U.S. casualties, just imagine how they treat the deaths of U.S. "enemies"--or better yet, read about it in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "A Million Iraqi Dead?: The U.S. Press Buries the Evidence" (1-2/08) by Patrick McElwee.