{"id":6206,"date":"2005-12-29T13:12:00","date_gmt":"2005-12-29T18:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6206"},"modified":"2005-12-29T13:12:00","modified_gmt":"2005-12-29T18:12:00","slug":"fallen-soldiers-open-caskets-and-freedom-of-the-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/fallen-soldiers-open-caskets-and-freedom-of-the-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Fallen soldiers, open caskets, and freedom of the press"},"content":{"rendered":"

While the war in Iraq is controversial enough, there’s been a peripheral debate over the policy on photographs of coffins. Usually, questions have centered around Bush’s policy<\/a>, attempts to change it<\/a>, and the pictures<\/a> that have come to the public’s attention through a Freedom of Information Act request.<\/p>\n

But there’s an interesting First Amendment debate<\/a> in Oklahoma that’s a little different.<\/p>\n

The father and grandfather of an Oklahoma soldier slain in Iraq lost their lawsuit over the publication of his open-casket photo in Harper’s Magazine when a federal judge found that the public’s right to see it outweighed the family’s privacy.<\/p>\n

The fact that about 1,200 people, including Oklahoma’s governor, saw Kyle Brinlee’s body when they attended his May 19, 2004, funeral in the Pryor High School auditorium played into U.S. District Judge Frank Seay’s decision.<\/p>\n

“If the plaintiffs wanted to grieve in private they should not have held a public funeral and had a section reserved for the press,” Seay wrote in granting summary judgment on Dec. 22 to Harper’s Magazine and photographer Peter Turnley.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can’t even imagine the pain the Brinlee family has had to endure, and in general, I’m inclined to think they are entitled to privacy at a funeral service.<\/p>\n

Having said that, the ruling in this case makes sense. About 1,200 people attended the funeral — which was open to the public — and Harper’s showed readers the same images grievers saw in person.<\/p>\n

“We have great sympathy for the family and great sympathy for Kyle and all the other soldiers we depicted in the essay,” Harper’s Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur said. “I feel we have an obligation to show the coffins and the bodies in a respectful way, and we thought this was a perfectly respectful way to do it.”<\/p>\n

Brinlee’s death was a tragedy, but given the circumstances, freedom of the press deserved protection here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While the war in Iraq is controversial enough, there’s been a peripheral debate over the policy on photographs of coffins. Usually, questions have centered around Bush’s policy, attempts to change it, and the pictures that have come to the public’s attention through a Freedom of Information Act request. But there’s an interesting First Amendment debate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}