9/11: 10 years later the images are still painful

We're about three weeks out from the official 10-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Already, the news media is running stories about that horrible day.

The first one I saw was a piece about how the Associated Press photographers made it through that incredibly traumatic assignment, how they put aside their emotions to do the job at hand and cover the news before breaking down.

The story was good, the accompanying photographs were not.

The images were painful reminders of the tremendous loss of innocent lives.

I am sure that on Sept. 11, 2011 we will be inundated with powerful photos and videos from that day.

I am just happy that I am where I am and won't have to endure too much of that.

The anniversary of the terror attacks is newsworthy and if I was in my old capacity as news editor of a daily newspaper, I would be pushing my staff for stories with a local perspective from that day.

But, I would also lobby hard to not run the disturbing images.

They are too painful, too powerful, too emotional. There are family members, friends who carry around enough reminders of that day
 without having photographs of an event that took so many innocent lives thrown in their faces.

It has already been documented for historical archives, we saw it, lived it, grieved. Do we really want to reopen all of that? The people most affected by what happened that day have been through enough. The rest of the country? I dare say there is anybody beyond their teens who hasn't seen those images dozens of times.

The other side of that argument is, of course, that we need to remember what happened that day, that we never allow it to happen again. While that is true, we need to realize how terribly powerful photographs can be, how they affect people, no matter what moment they capture. Some punch us in the gut, some hit us in the heart.

There is also the school of thought that everybody else will be publishing a hosty of images from the archives of that day and that "everybody else will run them, why shouldn't we?"

I remember Sept. 11, 2001. I wrote the lead local story on the events of that day, contacting people from our area who were in New York City during the attacks. I wrote our editorial for the next day. I worked with my editors, the staff, to put together a very comprehensive report from our little roost in southern Utah.

We published the images with our report, but we also used compassion in deciding which images not to publish. We worried about how people would react, discussed how powerful a photo can be.

Editorial decisions can be difficult to make. I remember the lengthy discussion we had a few years before about whether to publish the photo from the Oklahoma City bombings of the fireman carrying a baby from the razed building. It was a tough call. In the end, we decided to run the shot because of the compassion, tenderness, gentleness of the image. As a footnote, the baby in that photo died and the fireman comitted suicide. The photo haunted the fireman. I can only imagine what it still does to the parents of that baby.

So, I'm hoping content editors use good judgment and sensitivity in their selection of photos and videos to run with the stories that will be published as they recall the events of that day. Before you print, broadcast, or publish them, take a moment to think of how people would be affected, the turmoil that can be caused by the power of photography, what it will do to the heart, the brain, the soul.

There are a lot of images we just don't want or need to see again because they trigger too many raw emotions.