That does not mean there has never been graphic death in newspapers. In the first decades of the 20th century, pictures of dead mobsters and suicides filled the tabloids. But in the last two decades, along with the rise of graphic violence on television and in the movies, both the grittier tabloids and the more restrained broadsheets took a different approach. You wind up trying to look for something that has something else in it that makes it more powerful. People agonized over it because it was a baby.
Nobody wants to put a baby in the paper.
But it so symbolized the loss of innocence, the fact that we were as vulnerable to terrorism as anyone else. Editors who chose to run photographs of charred corpses in a Nairobi morgue after this summer's embassy bombing, or the face of an old Albanian man killed in a Kosovo massacre, made the same argument. The visible dead tend to have two things in common. For one, they have usually died at human hands. With the exception of the youth whose ash-covered body was photographed from the air after the explosion at Mount St. Helens in 1980, dead victims of natural disasters, as well as victims of airplane crashes, tend not to be shown in the news media.