When I first went to report the American war against Vietnam, in the 1960s, I visited the Saigon offices of the great American newspapers and TV companies, and the international news agencies.
I was struck by the similarity of displays on many of their office pinboards. “That’s where we hang our conscience,” said an agency photographer.
There were photographs of dismembered bodies, of soldiers holding up severed ears and testicles and of the actual moments of torture. There were men and women being beaten to death, and drowned, and humiliated in stomach-turning ways. On one photograph was a stick-on balloon above the torturer’s head, which said: “That’ll teach you to talk to the press.”
The question came up whenever visitors caught sight of these pictures: why had they not been published? A standard response was that newspapers would not publish them, because their readers would not accept them. And to publish them, without an explanation of the wider circumstances of the war, was to “sensationalise”.
At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this; atrocities and torture by “us” were
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 7 May 2004
