They saw the picture, knew it was newsworthy, and believed the military should be heard, but they thought it would harm their preferred political party in the upcoming elections. I am reluctant to believe this because I prefer not to believe that there is such a widespread pattern of deliberate politically-motivated distortion of the news. Some of you may consider my preference naïve, but there it is. Given the proximity to the election and the further embarrassment which this picture would have given to the Democratic Party, I am troubled by my reluctant acknowledgement that this may be the most likely explanation.
Explanation 5.
They saw the picture, knew it was newsworthy, believed the military should be heard, and were willing to let it harm their party, but they were afraid of what their Democratic readers might do to them for such a breach of loyalty. Forgive me if I sound dramatic here, but this option sounds rather nasty. In fact, it sounds very much like the kind of reasoning which went into the decision not to publish another set of pictures not very long ago.
Even though the aftermath of the Danish Mohammed cartoons was covered widely in the news, the pictures themselves (which served as the convenient pretext for such outrageously disproportionate violence) were almost never printed. Whether for fear of the consequences or for fear that the patent mildness of the cartoons compared with the most ordinary of American editorial page drawings would further embarrass the reactionary Muslims, almost no newspapers or magazines in the United States reprinted them. Which I suppose leads me to my most sincere question. If the people running American news media had seen this picture, were not too dense to realize it was newsworthy, didn’t feel like censoring the military, and weren’t afraid to run content which might harm the Democrats in the election, did the decision to not print it mean that they were just as afraid of Democrats as they are of radical Muslims?
I suspect that many people will be considering whether they want to give their money, either by subscription or advertising, to newspapers and magazines who showed us something very troubling about themselves by failing to publish this picture prior to the election. It makes me wonder just what sort of free press it is that the very men in this picture are fighting to protect and export around the world. Then again, perhaps the freedom they fight for is poignantly demonstrated by the fact that we all knew about this picture in spite of the failure to publish it by those increasingly irrelevant sources of information called newspapers.