Regular readers will know I don’t have a very high opinion of the profession in general. No doubt there are many good people who work for newspapers, television, news radio and news magazines. You just don’t come across them that often.

Mudville Gazette has a post that will make your stomach turn.

“I don’t like working in Iraq. The terrain is flat and uninteresting, the food is terrible, the weather is ridiculous, and to be honest, the people are not that charming or interesting. And yes, it’s very dangerous, even compared to other wars,” he said. “But I don’t feel that I have the ability to write off the Iraq war just because it isn’t fun anymore.”

Chris Hondros, a veteran war photographer in an article for the New York Times

I wanted to be fair to Mr. Hondros so I read the entire NYT article before posting. While we are at it the author of the article David Carr is a scumbag as well.

A study of 200 American and international journalists covering the Iraq war, done by American University School of Communication in 2004, found that 17 percent of them worked for organizations that would not publish pictures of the dead, and 42 percent had rules discouraging the practice. Absent government censorship, there are a variety of taste issues and commercial considerations — a dead body is never a good adjacency for ads — and a squeamish public aesthetic that can lead to germane but grisly photographs being left on the darkroom floor.

Really? You mean advertisers don’t want to see dead bodies of American Soldiers opposite their ads because its bad for business? How about common freaking decency!!?

Carr continues:

An odd bifurcation in cultural sensibilities is at work as well: Americans are rabid fans of “reality” programming, save for the real McCoy. Exploded heads and bloody entrails land easily on audiences when rendered in computer animation on the big screen, but the same images in newsprint or on a newscast are seen as vile and somewhat pornographic. “Supporting our troops” — who doesn’t, by the way? — apparently means averting our eyes when they end up on the wrong end of a firefight.

I am almost at a loss for words here. Is this man so cynical that he can not discern the difference between the fascination (sick as it may be) with movie violence and real people who have been killed in service to their country?

There are certainly times when showing the horrors of war in a way only photographs can depict are appropriate. Photo journalists who take such photos have a sacred responsibility to the dead and their surviving families to be sure they are viewed in context and not shown simply to exploit the death/s of heroes. This is exactly the reason Michael Yon is suing the vile, less than human, scum at Shock magazine.  

Honestly if you were sitting in on this conversation between Mr’s. Carr and Hondros would you find it hard not to punch either one of them in face? I certainly would.

**Update**

Riehl World View points out yet another journalistic double standard.

I seem to recall two MSM journalists being injured not that long ago and two recently killed. I don’t believe ABC had any interest in putting their planned to be anchor on view without him looking cleaned up and relatively unscathed. I’m not saying this to mean to those individuals injured or killed covering the war. But why the need to put the bodies of others on display?

Maybe they respect the privacy of their own?