The first time I saw photographers snapping shots of dazed evacuees being unloaded from a truck, I felt offended; it seemed that their very humanity was being exploited. Worse was the camera crew I watched getting a shot of a dead body lying in the street encircled by traffic cones.

But at some point — and I think it was after I left — it came to me that in order to truly tell the story of the tragedy, it is essential to capture the ugly images. After seeing just how desperate the situation is in New Orleans, I’m more convinced than ever that the media, for all the showboating and hotdogging that goes on — and there is plenty that goes on — nonetheless should be given unfettered access to report what they see.

Until they see the bodies in the street, until they watch the starving and the lost being loaded out of military trucks, and until they see people — Americans — covered in sores from wading for days through the fetid water inside their own houses, the American public won’t fully understand the magnitude of the disaster in the Gulf Coast.

And to those who feel that the media is exploiting the victims by dwelling on their misfortune, I would ask that they come and smell the stench of death, see the bodies lying for days in the street, witness the looted, abandoned blocks of a great American city. And then — and only then — decide whether you want to place limits on what the press can, and cannot report.

Read Part I: The Times-Picayune: How They Did It

Read Part II: Embedded with the Times -Picayune in New Orleans

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