A tale of a photograph in the first Gulf War. And not the one below. And it's not that no one would publish it, it's that no US news outlet published it at the time (and AP pulled it off the wire).
And, yes, it's a pretty gruesome picture, but, as the photographer, Kenneth Jarecke, wrote at the time, "If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it."
The War Photo No One Would Publish
When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. But the media wouldn’t run the picture.
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Would the fate of the photograph have been different if it had been photographed earlier in the war, or if the ground war had lasted longer?
Newspapers and magazines, at the end of the day, have to be attractive to their customers, and if you're a general interest magazine such as TIME, you are under some level of pressure to present (if I may use a 21st century term) "Murica." Even if you don't consider what the government may do, how would TIME's readers have reacted if TIME ran a photo that was "unpatriotic" and "un-American"?
The reaction of the AP is more disturbing, since it effectively denied its subscribing newspapers the choice of running the photo or not.
+John E. Bredehoft Well, arguably, that's part of what AP does — curate stories and images for their subscribers. They make editorial decisions all the time. That said, I think they made a poor one, for the wrong reasons, in this case.
I also recognize that news outlets walk a delicate line between conveying an accurate assessment of the truth and being commercially popular enough to survive. This strikes me as one of those moments, though, where principle is of the greatest value (and an opportunity to talk about, if that's where the conversation went, what is "un-American").