VITAMEDIAS
Web debate on photos of Hussein's sons: Photos of Saddam Hussein's dead sons quickly circulated across the Web on Thursday after the U.S. government released them, prompting debate at Web news sites about how and whether to display them. [...]
For example, most mainstream Web sites decided against airing the video of Daniel Pearl's death or images of U.S. soldiers captured during the recent war with Iraq, although surfers could easily find them on other sites.
[Al Tompkins, broadcast/online group leader at the Poynter Institute, a media think tank] said the debate this time around was more about how to show the pictures than whether to show them. There was no real journalistic purpose to showing images of Pearl or the soldiers, Tompkins said. The photos of Hussein's sons, on the other hand, have the potential to lay to rest questions about whether they're dead and change the course of the conflict.
"Why is this news? The reason it's news is because these are two wanted, very connected, very feared leaders in Iraq," Tompkins said.
[act.: 'Facial reconstruction' for Saddam's dead sons: The bodies of the two slain sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay, underwent "facial reconstruction" before they were shown to international correspondents on Friday, a US military official said.
"The two bodies have undergone facial reconstruction with mortician's putty to make them resemble as closely as possible the faces of the brothers when they were alive," a US military official told a pool correspondent.
This was standard practice and there was no intention to deceive, he said, speaking to around 15 journalists at Baghdad's international airport where the corpses were being kept.]