QUITE A DOUBLE STANDARD AT ABC

Here’s Nightline Executive Producer Leroy Sievers on Fallujah:

“War is a horrible thing. It is about killing,” ABC News “Nightline” Executive Producer Leroy Sievers said in an unusual message to the program’s e-mail subscribers discussing the issues posed by Wednesday’s killings. “If we try to avoid showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make it too easy to go to war again.”

And here’s ABC News chief David Westin on 9/11:

“The question is, are we informing or titillating and causing unnecessary grief?” ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times just days after the Sept. 11 attack. Explaining why his network decided not to show any pictures of people leaping to their deaths at the World Trade Center, he said, “Our responsibility is to inform the American public of what’s going on, and, in going the next step, is it necessary to show people plunging to their death?”

As I wrote last year:

What would [the media] think about showing the gore from the attack on the World Trade Center on television more? Shots of people jumping out of the windows of the WTC to their certain deaths rather than be burned in the fire or smashed by collapsing rubble? I doubt they’d be in favor it. And certainly the media has downplayed–practically eliminated–those images from its library of stock footage because, as ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times, it was “disturbing”.

Curious, that when it serves their interests and their biases, the media certainly doesn’t mind disturbing its viewers.

Instapundit also has some thoughts on Sievers’ quote:

terrorism is, in a very real sense, a creature of the mass media. But what strikes me is that after 9/11 they didn’t want to show graphic images of dead Americans for fear that it would make Americans want to go to war. Now they are proud of showing graphic images of dead Americans in the hopes that it will discourage Americans from going to war.

Now that they’ve admitted that they’re not neutral on this stuff, you have to wonder what side they’re on.

UPDATE: Westin of course, was the fellow who couldn’t initially decide if it was wrong for Al Qaida to have attacked the Pentagon on 9/11: