AMY GOODMAN: I want to point out that Pacifica, along with independent publications, sued the Pentagon over the press restrictions during the Gulf War. We couldn't get the major newspapers to join us.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: I was one of the plaintiffs.

AMY GOODMAN: You were with us. And we couldn't get one of the newspapers not only to join us, but to cover the lawsuit?

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: That's correct. Yes. I mean, that is -- well, they were -- and embarrassed as a result of all of that, they decided to try to negotiate for a different situation in the next American combat, and they did, and we had embedded reporters, which is a good thing because it gives you a piece that we should see, that is, the soldiers as they live during combat. And -- but it's, of course, not the full picture. And the only way you get the full picture is if you are on your own and you are functioning unilaterally and outside any particular ground rules, at your own risk.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the power of these pictures, what it meant to show this during Vietnam? I was wondering if you could just briefly for listeners and viewers who aren’t familiar with your own story, Sidney Schanberg, the film Killing Fields was very much about what you did, but if you could just briefly summarize.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, I think the pictures played a large role. I don't know how much because I was in Southeast Asia, so the truth is that someone back here in the United States can speak to how powerful they were in affecting public opinion. But from my point of view, the pictures are terribly important, and that is that if this is going to be a free press democracy, that you -- the press operates as a voice for the or a window for the public, and the public has a right to know just how bestial and horrible war is. And that's what we're there for, to tell people what's going on, and what it feels like and looks like and smells like where war is happening. And by not informing people, we make them -- we infantilize them so that they are shocked when they hear there’s torture, and they are shocked when something terrible happens that does get covered, and let's say the government has no control over. And so, it's just terribly important when we are making decisions to go to war, that the voters, the citizenry and everybody knows what war is like before you step into it. Because it is -- it should be a last resort, and in this case, in Iraq, it was not.

AMY GOODMAN: You quote a photojournalist at the end of your piece.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: David Leeson, whose pictures were shown with my piece.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what he said.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, he said -- David is very impassioned, and he is a terrific journalist and person. He said -- he -- the way he felt when he was working in Iraq was that “if I am hurting inside, then I want you,” that means the reader, the viewer, the audience, “I want you to hurt inside. And if I am brought to tears, I want you to be brought to tears, too.” That's exactly how one feels. I mean, that's how I felt. You feel a bit like you are throwing a tantrum, like you are saying, “Pay attention! Pay attention! People are dying here!”

AMY GOODMAN: James Rainey, in this piece, “Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories,” in The Los Angeles Times, U.S. newspapers and magazine print few photos of American dead and wounded. The reasons are many, but the result is an obscured view of the cost of war. You actually interview some of those who make these decisions not to show these pictures. Can you talk about those conversations?

JAMES RAINEY: Yeah. First of all, I’d like to say, though, one of the major reasons that we're not seeing these pictures of the American dead is the photographers just aren’t getting them. And some of that has to do with the actions of the government. A lot of it has to do with straight logistics. We're talking about a huge country. We're talking at any one time as few as three embedded journalists, and then others who, as Sidney said, are free to roam the country, there aren’t many of them right now who want to do that, because this is probably the most dangerous conflict that any of these folks have ever covered. That's what they told me. So, many of the decisions aren’t even made back here in the United States. There's no decision to be made, in essence, because the picture is never taken. The humvee gets blown up by a roadside. You know, there are six or seven G.I.s or marines killed, and they're shipped off to hospitals very quickly. The photographers often don't get there until it's all over.

Something else I just want to say about the historic part of this, I think it is hard to tell unless you were there what the effect of the photos in Vietnam was, but I interviewed David Halberstam about this and, of course, won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Vietnam, and he felt that, yes, the photographs had played an important role, but that really the American public sort of led in that regard, and that it was only after the Tet Offensive and all the losses on the American side in that war, that it then became maybe more acceptable for the press to run critical photos. There certainly had been some before 1968, but -- so, I think it's sort of questionable -- questionable about how much the press led even in Vietnam, where certainly some great work was done by journalists, by photojournalists.

In terms of the current conflict, I mean, what we found out was that there's a lot of reasons, and one of them is just that American editors are very loathe to show pictures of graphic violence. They just don't show pictures, even if it's a traffic accident across town, they tend not to want to show them. If you are in Europe or if you are in Latin America, you will see those pictures quite commonly. And then, I think there is a considerable pressure from, if not directly, indirectly from the military and certainly from the families of the soldiers and the marines to not have a lot of these photos in the paper.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, there's -- yes, Sidney Schanberg.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, first of all, Jim is right about the danger in Iraq. It probably is – it clearly is much more serious than in Vietnam because of the nature of that and this insurgency. But the truth is that you don't come across these pictures unless you are actually at the scene, but the larger truth is that there are pictures because other people take them, and if the editors wanted them, people -- journalists in Iraq and in the region would be trying to find pictures from local sources, someone with their own camera. And they would be bought and shown, and secondly, the families, I think, are the least of it because in most of these photos, the face is not shown, and the name does not have to be used. It is simply a soldier. And if the name isn't used, then -- and no one can identify the soldier, so then it isn’t really a problem.

The problem is the fear, I believe, that editors have of being called unpatriotic in a wartime situation. And the government uses that fear to further intimidate. And I think this is how it happens. I don't think it happens because photographers and journalists at the scene aren’t interested in pictures. I think that would -- I mean, that's foolish to say that, and pictures are important. So, you just have -- you have to get newspapers and television stations, their editors and their proprietors to say, yes, we're going to show these things.