The feedback page of Kenneth Irby's Poynter article is still missing any response from him to the questions posed there about his seeming advocacy of the "distortion" of images. But it's only been a day and I'm sure he's a busy guy, so I'll cut him some slack. However, from that page, Spanish journalist Juan Varela points to an interesting piece he wrote on his weblog on how Spanish and foreign press handled the images of March 11. It's in Spanish, but here, courtesy of the magical Babelfish and my own woefully inadequate language skills, is a nice bit about the manipulation of the Guerrero photo.

The English press has reflected on its behavior and the conclusions are pathetic. For the deputy editor for news of The Guardian, Paul Johnson, the photograph came "just in the margins of what we could use on the front page." The margins of what the readers of the progressive British newspaper would tolerate.

Johnson defends the conversion of the red blood to gray stone because it did not eliminate any element of the photo. An intellectual arabesque in the great British tradition: to mask things without making them disappear. Victorian reflex or political correctness? It was a peculiar decision when the newspaper's own ethical code indicates that all altered photographs must be identified as such.

At the conservative Daily Telegraph they're much clearer. "It's a question of taste. ... You clean up an image if you feel it does not change the context," says its picture editor, Bob Bodman.

In tumultuous times, with obscenities and violence all around, it is peculiar the importance of a leg: only a piece of bleeding flesh. Around it was death and true pain. The mystery of who was responsible and the whole tragedy beginning for the victims and their families.

And so many people repairing one leg.

>The pain and truth of the image [Periodistas 21]