Why no gore?

tirial: with posts like that, you should post more often. An excellent summation.

I personally don’t want gore seen for precisely the reasons that furt does; feelings are running high and hot enough already, without showing the broken and burned bodies of the victims. Suffice to say, I believe that all Americans know that the carnage is there, without having to see it live and in technicolor.

We have already had a few incidents of backlash against American citizens based upon ethnic identity and religious affiliation. And sadly, that is exactly what these terrorists wanted: for America to tear herself apart at the seams, to turn upon one another, in a hate-filled, unthinking retaliation.

I, personally, don’t want to go there. I don’t want my fellow citizens, brother and sister alike, to go there. And I don’t want to see that my country is as capable of fulfilling their worst expectations as they hoped when they launched this travesty.

I would much prefer to see a coldly reasoned, calculated response that hurts the perpetrators of this horrendous act more than an orgasmic flurry of destruction designed to be a cathartic release for our respective grief and rage.

The parable of the two bulls comes to mind:

[Moderator Hat: ON]

Phlosphr said:

To me, people like you are breaking the rules. Cool it. Now.


David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator

[Moderator Hat: OFF]

Did you write this Time magazine editorial?

Munch wrote:

Ah, good. Then, in the unlikely case that David B is arrested for something (public displays of skepticism, perhaps?), the police will remember to read him his Carmen Miranda rights.

furt wrote:

Oversexed? Americans?! You have got to be kidding me. The U.S. is one of the most prudish countries in the entire Free World!

Now, fat-assed, overfed, overcounseled, overmedicated, and undereducated I can agree with. But oversexed? Hah. I wish.

Prudish in some ways, yes. But overobsessed with sex, too. (perhaps in the way that only a prude can be.)

Don’t have the cites, but I’ve seen numbers that US citizens have sex earlier and more often than most anybody. (I think the scandanavians were up there, too.)

furt wrote:

Yeah! We’re overobsessed with sex because we don’t get laid enough! Or at least I don’t. And that’s what’s important.

How come I always seem to miss out on being part of these kinds of statistics, darn it!

Bingo, I don’t remember seeing any of your posts before. If this thread contains a representative sample, I’m hoping I won’t see any posts from you in the future. Yuck. :rolleyes:

Hear, hear! Ex-Tank’s got it right.

Now this is amusing, considering I won the title of “Poster with the most Vile and Disgusting Personal Habits” in the TMI thread.

Why would you make an idiotic comment like that?

You are a very small man, you know that? For some reason, you have this hard-on to see mutilated bodies (which, for the third friggin’ time, you can see just by going to Rotten.com). When you’re told “No”, you assume that people who don’t want to see it are pro-censorship?

Don’t you ever accuse me of wanting to censor anything, pal. Not only is it so wrong that it makes Jerry Falwell seem right, but it’s an accusation based on Ignorance. Learn a thing or two before you post again. It will help you greatly.

:wally

Is it entirely inappropriate to question the degree to which our news media ought to manipulate, if not censor or sanitize, the images it provides? (Although the OP may have erred in asking whether we are “owed” certain images.)

All too often the credo - for local news at least - seems to be “if it bleeds it leads.” I generally avoid watching the local news if for no other reason than to avoid such sensationalism. But in this instance, lines are being drawn. I do not believe it is unquestionably beyond debate to question who is drawing those lines and why.

Why do certain papers and news shows feel it is appropriate to show a falling body, but not the aftermath?
Why do they show a critically injured person, but not an obviously dead body?
What do these types of choices say about the news media, their target audiences, and our society as a whole?

FTR, I personally have no desire to view such images. I am not proud to admit that the horrendous images of falling people appealed to some morbid curiosity on my part, and I am disturbed that those images are indelibly etched on my mind.

Not at all. What’s inappropriate is demanding to see gore, and then hurling insults at people who disagree with you.

Hey, SPOOFE, I’m coming here late. You wanna discuss the former, or should I start a new thread?

Incidentally, for those who continue to incorrectly insist we didn’t see the bodies flying, there is a rather huge photo of just that in today’s Chicago Tribune, in their special section on the attacks.

Some years ago I remember sitting in an airport in San Diego and striking up a conversation with an army soldier just returned from a tour of duty in Gulf War. He had a collection of personal photos he had taken of what really happens to people when you hit a tank or a truck with a missile or flamethrower.

The pictures were gruesome beyond imagining and if anything their impact tended to quell martial feelings rather than encourage them.

The people in and under the rubble will look like human shaped sacks of bone and meat that have been pulverized, shredded, squashed, smashed and burned alive with limbs and skin torn off.

IMO the only duty the media “owes” anyone is that it owes the dead some measure of dignity and privacy. That this does not satisfy your desire for “the rest of the story” is really irrelevant.

I implied it before, but I think it needs repeating.

The aftermath of the WTC attack is very sanitized, because it’s a sanitized scene.

handy suggests looking at raw tape from satellite if you want to look at gore. I’ve been checking raw footage from Reuters, CNN, and ABC all week. It’s all very tame, very clean, nothing going on.

In the past I’ve seen charred corpses and a man being hacked to death on Reuters, so it’s not like they’re reluctant to send out gore.

I can only assume, not being in New York, that the ash and soot soaked up all the blood, and that any parts found (since it looks like hardly any corpse is still intact) are being swiftly placed into bags.

There ain’t much gore in New York unless you’re digging in the pit, and cameramen aren’t going to see that. Neither will you.

Ok Spoofey, that was uninspired, even for you. How is being told “no” different from censorship? Speaking of ignorance, how is carnage played on the local news different from NIGHT AND FOG playing on Bravo? I take it you’ve seen the movie?

Just curious, since I’ve denied it more than once, why do continually accuse me of me a gorehound? What does that do for you? Seriously, I would love to know.

Not only are you pro-censorship, you are being politically correct about it, too. How on earth can you walk such a thin tightrope?

Well let’s see. Could it be your choice of title for this thread?

Or could it be your OP, which seems to assert that you have a right to see blood and guts and body parts, coupled with your clear sense of grievance that no-one in the media seems to be willing to cater to your fetish?

Personally, I think you’re getting off lucky being called a gorehound. If this thread were in the Pit, you’d be getting called much, much worse. I stand by my earlier comment.

I heard someone say that while watching the live news, they saw a head rolling down the street. Personally, I don’t believe it. How would a collapsing building launch someone’s head into the street at such velocity that it speeds beyond that thick dust cloud? Anyway, I think this is a typical case of people freaking out. We’ve all seen the boogyman in our closet doorways when we were kids. However, I wouldn’t mind feeling a little more “real” about it by spotting a body part in the debris. However, the ratio of humans to steel/concrete/plaster/etc. would make it unlikely that we’d ever see anything on camera. I haven’t even heard any horrific stories of the condition of bodies they found.

The L. A. Times has two photos of falling people here. Scroll to the bottom and click on “U.S. Under Attack” and you’ll get a popup with 75 photos. Pictures 5 and 21 show people in mid-fall. They do NOT have photos of people after they have fallen, nor do they have pictures of body parts, which I am sure will disappoint BingoBurrito.

BingoBurrito?

Was that a racist slam, jab1, you simplistic swine?

I am Swiss, German, Irish, Pole and Czech. Or would you like to regroup and slam these people, as well?

No matter, you hatemongering fool. Both you and NORTHERN PIPER are the intolerant monkeys. You mean nothing to me. SPOOFE is your organ grinder. Let your mantra of cyclical, self-imposed misunderstanding hate ring throughout the world.