Saturday, June 07, 2008

Did they ever actually ban pictures of soldiers' coffins?

In 2006, there was talk of banning the media from covering the repatriation of soldiers' bodies. The reason given at the time was that it was for the privacy of the bereaved, which I thought was strange because I'd only ever seen pictures of the coffins, not pictures of the bereaved. But I thought that ban did go through (and in 2006 I blogged as though the ban had gone through).

But in today's Star, there were pictures of the bereaved. And now that I think about it, we have been seeing pictures of the bereaved for quite a while, as well as pictures of the coffins being carried by other soldiers.

So did that ban not go through, or what? I thought it did, I can't google up any evidence that it didn't (although I am getting a lot of interference from websites discussing the similar US ban, even when I use Canada as a keyword and try to restrict my results to Canadian sites) or that it was rescinded. So what's up with that? And when did they start printing pictures of the bereaved instead of just the coffins?

1 comment:

laura k said...

I don't think that ban went through in Canada. I could be wrong, but I think it's only in the US.