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.

Perhaps it takes this level of hit-us-over-the-head bluntness for media to notice that a mass murder is also a hate crime, when the victims of that crime are solely women. In contrast to many other shootings in which similar motivations have gone unreported over the past two decades, the Associated Press (and several other news outlets picking up [their] story) have chosen to discuss the extremely relevant role of misogyny as the root cause of the bloody tragedy in Collier County.

According to the Editor & Publisher blog, [Pennsylvania shooter George] Sodini’s website also contained slams against "the liberal media," Obama, the election of "The Black Man," and jokes about black men and white women. E&P notes that the AP and other outlets have omitted these details. Had Sodini aimed his guns specifically and only at people of color, ignoring information about his bigotry would not only be racist, it would also deprive the public of a full understanding of the nature of his crime. But while his racist webpages certainly add a fuller picture to this disturbed killer's mindset, in this case the AP discussed the part of the website most relevant to the crime: Sodini's anger at being sexually rejected, his deep-seated resentment toward women and his stated plans to kill women.

Calling this "an important step forward in media understanding of and coverage of this sort of crime," Pozner is glad that "finally, a gender-based hate crime is being reported (at least by the AP, at least for now) within the context of the killer’s actual anti-woman agenda." However, "if the press’s previous track record is any indicator, Sodini’s misogyny could potentially fall out of the frame of follow-up reporting."

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)

Strupp quotes Guild president Bernie Lunzer saying the result "does demonstrate that there is strength in bargaining," that "people can push back" and they "are correct now to question what management is doing, to pursue more control over their futures":

Boston is among the few guild locals in the past year to reject contracts that called for concessions. In many cases, from the Denver Post to the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, guild members have approved furloughs, pay cuts and various benefit reductions when management asked....

"People will take concessions and take less when they believe it is being done fairly," says Lunzer. "There is not a [guild contract] situation out there that isn't a difficult one."

But Boston was somewhat different in that the guild rejected an initial offer even amid threats of a shutdown and sale of the paper, a sale that appears inevitable. In recent weeks, guild locals at the Times Union in Albany, N.Y., and the Indianapolis Star have also rejected contract proposals. But leaders in both of those units believe new contracts will be approved.

On the subject of negotiations "being done fairly," Lunzer goes into details when describing how the "New York Times Company, which owns the Globe, used the controversial lifetime job guarantees of some 170 guild members as an unfair issue in the recent bargaining." While "the guild agreed to give up that protection in this latest agreement," Lunzer asserts that "the issue was exploited by New York Times management... to cause divisiveness."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: Jonathan Tasini on the Boston Globe/GM (6/12/09).