No, even though "tax day" was yesterday, that title is not a pun on the two inevitable things in life (although, now that I think about it, it certainly could be used in such a fashion). It is meant, instead, to be read literally.

The question of when it is permissible to show death on television is in the news today because of a scathing commentary by Jon Stewart over the media's relentless showing -- unedited, unpixelated, and in full -- the recent video of a man shot in the back while running from a cop. Stewart didn't get into several aspects of the editorial decision to run the video, instead he was mostly focused on what he called turning the video "into screensaver mode... running as background wallpaper in your discussion," on cable news shows. He then detailed why he was so annoyed:

Listen, news media, turning the last moments of someone's life into 'newzac' that just plays in the backgrounds of discussions slowly robs those images of their power. And more importantly the people in the videos of their humanity. And we've gotta nip this trend in the bud, because unlike Blockbuster, these types of videos ain't going away.

Fair enough. But I take a slightly different position. I must admit that I, too, was rather surprised at the news media running the clip unedited, but mostly because it was so rare for them to do so. I've commented on two aspects of television and death previously, so a quick review is in order first.

One of the very first blog posts I ever wrote (I think it was the sixth I had penned) was titled "Rape And Murder Should Not Be A Cartoon"), which I wrote in reaction to the news that five American soldiers had raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and murdered her family. In it, I described how the news media treated the story:

The animation starts by showing a little cartoon house. Some cartoon soldiers appear and move into the house. One of these cartoon soldiers hustles three cartoon Iraqis into a back room. His little cartoon gun goes off and the Iraqis immediately become dead cartoon bodies. The cartoon soldier returns to the main room in the cartoon house and (thankfully) does not cartoon-rape the cartoon teenage Iraqi girl. Instead, the images freeze while the rape is described by a disembodied voice. The cartoon soldier then returns to life and shoots the cartoon teenage Iraqi. I cannot say whether the cartoon soldier was then shown to burn the cartoon Iraqi girl's body, because I had to turn the television off at that point out of sheer disgust.

I then went on to clarify exactly what it was that disgusted me so much about not only this cartoon representation of brutality, but about war coverage in general (for context, this was the summer of 2006):

Don't get me wrong, I protest not out of squeamishness. When President Bush recently complained about seeing dead soldiers on American television, I wondered what channel he had been watching. In all the news coverage I've seen yet, I don't think I've seen a single dead American soldier on television. There were the four Americans brutally killed and mutilated in Fallujah, but they weren't even soldiers, they were contractors. And that footage was forced on the American networks, since everyone else in the world had already seen it. Even then, most American networks pixilated out the shots of the burned bodies.

Go back to television archives and take a look at what Americans saw on the news every night during the Vietnam War. War is hell—and there it was for the public to view. Wounded American soldiers screaming in pain, soldiers with limbs blown off, and dead soldiers' bodies. What do we get now? Bloodless, costless, emotionless sanitized video games. The administration even bans photos of distinguished flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers' bodies because they're scared we might figure out that people die during war.

So I do not argue that these cartoons need to stop because they are too graphic, but because they bowdlerize and cheapen the harsh realities of warfare: people get hurt, there are often bloodstains and body parts in the streets, people die, and yes, atrocities are sometimes committed. But if you don't have footage of it, spare us the animated reenactment.

The second time I wrote about death and television was three years later, when the news (and video) of an Iranian girl's death was the big story. In "The Media's Double Standard On Showing Neda's Death" I wrote:

The American media has an enormous double standard on portrayals of violence on our television screens. It can be succinctly summed up as: real-world violence is obscured or (even worse) turned into a cartoon, but fictional violence is shown in stunningly full-color and high-definition clinical graphic detail -- for our entertainment. This disconnect is infantile. It is a form of censorship that the American public, for the most part, isn't even really aware of. But sometimes, as in the footage of the death of Neda from Iran, the disconnect itself is glaringly apparent.

After reiterating my stance on cartoons replacing real footage of violence, I considered the position of the news editor in such decisions:

A harder call for the news media is when there is actual footage of violence. There is a complex decision-making process which is followed in these cases. The first question is "does it show an American?" If an American is shown being killed on screen (which rarely happens), it is almost always pixelated. American dead bodies and body parts are either not shown at all, or pixelated as well. Dead bodies or deaths of foreigners get more leeway. Sometimes they're shown, sometimes not, and they can even be shown without pixelization (as long as there are no loose body parts, which seem to be completely banned). Blood on the streets is acceptable when it came from foreigners, but usually not from Americans.

When the footage of a young woman on the streets of Tehran who had just been shot and died on camera hit the airwaves, the American media (at least the parts that I saw, admittedly a subset of the whole) did a curious thing. The clip was rolled, and at the beginning (when Neda's face wasn't bloody), they showed the whole thing without pixels. But then as blood began flowing on her face, the face was suddenly pixelated out. And her actual death was not shown, as most media froze the picture before this happened. But there was a problem with the storyline here, because the still image of her bloody face had been turned into a powerful protest poster, very reminiscent of the Obama campaign poster. So the news media all showed the poster. With the same image of a bloody face that they had just pixelated out.

This, as I said before, is juvenile. It is editorial hair-splitting.

Either show us the video uncensored, or don't show the poster. You can't really have this one both ways. The American public can either handle this image or we can't. Decide, and be consistent.

I then spoke of the double standard of entertainment versus what is shown on the evening news:

But I still have to say, in the culture we have today, the double standard is kind of ridiculous. Turn on your television during just about any hour of primetime during the week, and you can see -- in full graphic detail -- autopsies, dead bodies, how those bodies got dead (with "bullet cam" animations following the slow-motion path of the bullet into the body, complete with the destruction to the body which results), violent murders, violent deaths, violence, bodies, violence, and more violence. Forensic shows are quite popular, which show -- in full high definition color -- bodies which have been burnt, drowned, dismembered, skeletonized, and just about every other thing you can image a poor body going through. And even a few you never could have imagined on your own, for good measure.

Now, I'm not some sort of prude. If it's OK with America to show these things on primetime television, when all the children ("Won't someone think of the children!!") are watching, that's OK with me. Images which weren't even allowed in R-rated movies when I grew up (even the horror movies) are now apparently just fine to watch while eating dinner.

As I said, that's OK with me. If I don't want to watch it, I will change the channel or turn off the idiot box and read a book.

But with such lax standards for primetime, why is the news so timid? At the same time entertainment (fictional) shows have seemingly thrown out the decency standards, the news media picked up those standards and started applying them to reality. In other words, it didn't always used to be this way. If you don't believe me, seek out pretty much any representative video from the Vietnam War from the staid and "decent" news programs of the day. If you've never seen such footage, it will shock you.

War is ugly. People die. In gruesome and painful ways. There are dead bodies, and injured soldiers, and wounded people screaming, and blood and violence. That's what war is. Bombs cause an awful lot of destruction, as well as the hundred other ways we've developed to kill each other.

I finished the article calling for death to be shown, unbowdlerized (my apologies for the long excerpts today, I considered just re-running this whole column, but wanted to comment on Stewart and the recent video as well):

And when there is video available of a death, whether it is of a young woman shot by her government's security services or any other tragedy, I really think the news media either needs to show it, or censor the thing entirely. Pixelizing a face is trying to have it both ways. It's like a nudity-free burlesque show as opposed to a strip show. The peek-a-boo nature of showing it with pixelated bits is pathetic. Either this sort of thing is acceptable for the public to see (as it clearly is, from the primetime lineup of the same networks who censor real-life violence), or it is not.

Having it both ways merely treats the public as children. And that's not what the news is supposed to be about, at least in my book.

I still feel that way, which is why I was surprised to see the unedited shooting video actually on the news. It's a rarity for an actual human being (as opposed to an actor on a fictional show) to actually die on television in such a fashion. It shows death to be much different from the Hollywood version. It shows, in a word, reality.

Which is why I admit I am kind of astonished that the media both (1) were provided the unedited video, and (2) chose to show it. The untold story here is what the family's wishes were, in my opinion. There is a historic example, after all, and I wonder if it influenced his close family or not. The open-casket funeral of Emmett Till was a powerful and galvanizing event in the struggle for civil rights in the South, and his mother absolutely insisted on a public viewing of what had been done to her son's body. The only photos of his corpse ran in African-American publications, but they told a powerful story on their own. So I wonder if the parents in the recent shooting had anything to do with the full release of the video -- and in the editorial decision to show the entire thing. The decision for an editor would indeed be influenced by a parent demanding that the entire video be shown to America, so the public could all bear witness to what had occurred.

Like I said, it is an untold story (although I fully admit someone in the media may well have already told this story, and I just missed it). I wonder if Jon Stewart would have the same take on things if the parents were the ones who demanded the widest possible exposure of the film, to put this another way.

Being a big fan of the First Amendment, I have to say I approve of seeing death on the news, in full -- especially when a political point can so easily be drawn from such a depiction. I would have supported Emmett Till's mother, too. If it is morally fine to have three hours of primetime broadcast television with the most gruesome mock-ups of dead bodies the special effects guys can come up with, then I think it should be just as allowable to show real death on the evening news. Death can be a powerful motivator of society to change things. Neda's death and Emmett Till's death were both pivotal moments.

I have to admit my thinking this week has also been influenced by sitting through a recent PBS Frontline episode, entitled "Memory of the Camps." It consists of an hour of documentary footage from the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. It is without question the most brutal footage I've ever seen anywhere, and it aired on television. A very large percentage of the footage is of Nazi SS guards being forced to bury bodies in mass graves, by the tens of thousands, after the camps were liberated. It's like the most horrific parts of Schindler's List, over and over again, for an entire hour. There is no better word to describe the footage than "brutal."

There are bodies by the thousands, most of them naked. Death is shown on a wholesale scale. There are shots of naked prisoners after liberation, to testify what had been done to their bodies by the Nazis. It is absolutely horrific stuff. No one who watches it will ever forget the footage. It simply can't be unseen, afterwards. No one who watches it can ever take any "Holocaust denier" seriously, because your own eyes can see what they can see.

These films were made for a reason. They were made to fully document the inhumane reality the Allied soldiers found in these camps. German citizens -- the most prominent ones from the surrounding towns -- were forced to watch the mass burials, so they could never deny what had been done right next to their towns. The films are documentary and testamentary to history.

Sometimes, when faced with death, the only thing to do is to show it, especially when there is a lesson to be learned from the deaths. So I have to disagree with Stewart. Seeing that film over and over again doesn't detract from the man's death, it forces all Americans to confront it. This is how a black man died, that film unequivocally says. Here is a policeman planting evidence next to the body. Those are powerful truths, and they do need to be seen in full. What surprises me, in fact, is that they were shown unedited, because it has become so rare for television news to do so.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant