'Realities of war'

The former BBC correspondent Martin Bell reported from trouble spots at a time when constraints on what could be shown were far stricter. "This reached such a point in the early 1990s that we could show almost nothing of the realities of war. Yet this makes war seem a romantic exercise. I would try to use one image that was shocking but was emblematic of what we had left out," he told BBC News Online. "In a report on the Ahmici massacre in 1993, in which more than 100 Muslims were murdered - some burned alive in their homes - we used one picture of a burnt, clenched fist." Last week, an Italian hostage was shot in the back of the neck by his Iraqi captors, who filmed his killing. While footage and stills of the various hostages seized in Iraq has been widely shown, not so this disturbing turn of events.  A video was sent to the Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera, but a spokesman said it wouldn't be screened as it was "too bloody" - earlier footage of the hostages was used instead. The same judgement was made by other media outlets, including newspapers and websites. As such, an execution-style killing is one of the few remaining taboos. Last year when kidnappers filmed the beheading of the US journalist Daniel Pearl, the American network CBS took the rare step of airing the moments leading up to his death. The move was condemned as "heartless" by his wife and family, and by US government officials. The footage also cropped up online, but the few US-based websites to use it were asked to remove it by the FBI. An alternative newspaper in Boston also faced criticism after reproducing photos of Pearl's dead body. The video was made available to the BBC, but a decision was taken not to use it. The corporation's guidelines state that: "There are almost no circumstances in which it is justified to show executions or other scenes in which people are being killed."

Bodies filmed

Images of dead bodies are not taboo, however. Victims of war, terror attacks and disasters are shown to convey the gravity of what has happened, but close-ups of the dead are generally avoided out of respect for those involved. Following the Madrid train bombings UK newspapers including The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun and the Daily Mail airbrushed a picture of the scene to remove what was thought to be a severed limb. The Guardian changed the colour of the body part from red to grey, so readers would be unlikely to see it. But there are exceptions - such as the decision to show the corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein. They were filmed in an attempt to convince Iraqis the men had perished. Images of the bullet-ridden bodies of the Romanian dictator, Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife Elena were also widely used. Footage of their summary trial and execution were shown on television in Romania and around the world. "But the killing of hostages is a taboo that should never be broken," says Mr Bell. "I did once show a man being killed in a report. He was in a convoy that was shot at. That's what happens in warfare."

Sound and vision

The moment of a death of natural causes has also been screened, a trail first blazed by the acclaimed 1998 documentary series The Human Body, which showed a cancer patient's last days. If a graphic picture paints a thousand words, sound too can convey a dreadful situation. When French film-makers Gedeon and Jules Naudet accompanied fire-fighters into the stricken World Trade Center in 2001, they turned their cameras away from the bodies falling to earth outside. Instead, the soundtrack to their documentary 9/11, broadcast worldwide on the first anniversary of the attacks, was punctuated by the thumps of this unseen horror. But do we need to be confronted with such graphic depictions to fully understand an event or issue? Julian Baggini, editor of the Philosopher's Magazine, says yes - although people should be wary of assuming that just because they find something repulsive, it must be wrong. "We should be allowed to see graphic images because these represent a reality that we're trying to make a moral judgement about." Another view is that the shock of seeing a graphic image - be it an aborted foetus, a slaughtered seal or a mutilated civilian casualty of war - can eclipse all other thinking about an issue. Meegan Lane/BBC.