Editor and Publisher faults the media for showing “graphic Zarqawi images” but not dead Americans in an article called “Dead and Loving It“:

Many top newspaper Web sites which, like their print cousins, rarely show close-up photos of dead U.S. soldiers or civilians in Iraq, made a major exception today, in highlighting graphic images of deceased terrorist leader Musab Abu al-Zarqawi. Most leading sites featured one or more large photos of the face of the dead man, apparently killed in a U.S. air strike on Wednesday, at the top of their home pages and/or in nearby photo galleries.

E&P, whose editor Greg Mitchell makes a habit of urging newspaper editorial boards to oppose the war, appears fixated on grisly war images. Last Sunday, they ran an item about a Reuters photo of a severed head being removed from a box, with the same complaint that the media don’t show enough of the war’s violence.