WASHINGTON — Newsrooms across the country are deliberating whether to run a picture of Osama bin Laden's corpse, should it become available, and, if so, in what manner, ethicists and journalists said Thursday.
The White House has made the decision that such an image won't be released, so the issue may be moot. But CIA Director Leon Panetta, speaking frankly before that decision became final, said he assumed such a picture will surface.
Most news organizations tend to have general guidelines against using pictures of dead people, but they also make exceptions. Think of the iconic pictures of the U.S. servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, or the Blackwater contractors' bodies hanging from the bridge over the Euphrates in Fallujah, Iraq.
Mentioned later in the article is 2008-2009 Reynolds Fellow Bill Densmore:
Bill Densmore, a professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, said it was "absolutely right" for the Associated Press to request the photo through the Freedom of Information Act. But he was also "sort of impressed" with President Barack Obama's rationale for not releasing it and "his comment that, hey, we don't need to spike the football, that there's no reason to gloat."
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