I watched a program on the History Channel last week that showed the collapse of the WTC towers. It was the first time in a year or more that I'd seen those terrible images. Within days of 9-11, the news media decided to self-censure by not showing the images very much any more. They thought the images were too upsetting.

As Stephen O'Leary wrote for the Annenberg Online Journalism Review after the first anniversary of 9-11:

Poynter singled out Peter Jennings for his “superb job” in introducing some brief and highly edited clips of the twin towers collapsing with these words: "We've been, I hope you agree, judicious about showing coverage from that day all throughout the last year. Our bosses decided, we all think quite wisely, to show the actual collapse of the buildings only when it was absolutely necessary. And this perhaps is one of those occasions when we will show it…”

“Absolutely necessary”? This makes me more than a little nervous. Tell me, please: Who will decide what we need to see and when?

Watching the footage as broadcast on a variety of networks throughout the day, I was struck by the uncharacteristic caution exhibited by our national media. Journalists were evidently mindful -- to the point of self-reverence -- of their role as guides in a vast exercise of collective memory, a canonization of the martyred victims.

There is a part of me, to be sure, that agrees with those who attack the media for its sensationalistic uses of violent imagery -- a part that was glad we were not forced last week to relive September 11, 2001. But I have to confess a dirty little secret. There is another part of me that found the “tasteful” editing of the imageries deeply unsatisfying.

OK, I’ll admit it -- it makes me feel cheap and disgusting, but there it is -- I wanted to see more. To remember more. To view unedited footage of bodies falling through the air and buildings collapsing. To watch again in horror as Palestinian children celebrated on the streets of East Jerusalem.

I know this argument will not be popular. But let me be very precise here, with the understanding that some will inevitably be offended no matter how I qualify this point. I am not arguing that the networks last Wednesday should have shown all the footage of planes crashing and bodies falling. It would surely have been an insult to survivors and a breach of public responsibility to mix such images into coverage of the solemn services of commemoration, the litany of names of the dead, and the struggling attempts of thousands to find “closure.”

But something about the sanitizing of the historical images of September 11 is deeply troubling. The journalists’ restraint was a sign that the day belonged to the victims and their families. Taken to an extreme, however, such restraint can easily turn into something much worse -- and more dangerous -- than laudable self-censorship. Historians, and any citizen who cares about historical memory, must ask: “Who controls these images? Who is to be allowed to view them, and under what circumstances, with what limitations?”