Marianna Spicer-Brooks serves journalists well in exploring the impact of violent images on those who view them. I have no doubt that the sight of exploding buildings and falling bodies fill many with fear and others with resolve. I would not doubt that they make some people sick.

Why, then, should we show them?

To remember.

Last week David Handschuh, another Poynter Ethics Fellow, delivered a moving speech and slide presentation of images from Sept. 11. David barely survived with his life while shooting for the New York Daily News. As I watched the images against the backdrop of somber music and the counterpoint of sniffles throughout the room, I was struck by a powerful realization. In fewer than 100 days, I had forgotten the horrors of Sept. 11. I had forgotten the agony, the level of destruction, the carnage, the despair, and the levels of grief. Perhaps my forgetting was my version of "flight," the alternative to the "fight" American soldiers are now waging.

I draw my precedents from the Holocaust. I have learned the power of memory from memoirists such as Elie Wiesel who in their life and work teach us never to forget. Forgetting --or not using the tools of remembrance--makes the world a comfort for deniers. Viewing the images from Buchenwald depresses me, sickens me, skeletal bodies stacked like cordwood. Fanatics in America and abroad deride these images as a "fairy tale." They would certainly prefer these horrible images never to be shown.

Aristotle defines tragedy as a form that produces the effect of catharsis, the purging of the emotions of pity and fear. Pity draws us to the suffering hero. We identify with him. Fear drives us away. The gods could punish us. The best journalists, I would argue, helps us purge our emotions, balance our feelings of sympathy and grief.

On the NBC Today Show, Max Frankel, the former editor of The New York Times, said that news was all about fear. When people are afraid--of war, of plague, of natural disaster--they turn back to the news. I think Frankel is right, but only half right. I think they turn to the news not to have fear squared, but to hope.

I have no doubt that journalists can get it right as we approach the holidays and the end of the year. They can remind us of our collective suffering as a people, and they can give us hope by balancing the images of violence, hate, and death with those of compassion, caring, and love. In times of national grief and emergency, the milk of human kindness need not serve as the milk of amnesia. We continue to love because we will not forget.