The AP is taking heat from the Defense Secretary for releasing a controversial photo of a dying marine in Afghanistan.

We can't show you that photo but we will tell you about the controversy. Here at KOMU, we have a policy not to show bodies so that photo did not have made our air.

An AP photographer took the picture as Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard lay mortally wounded from a rocket propelled grenade. The father of the fallen soldier had this to say about the AP's decision to make the photo available on its wire service.

"There are good decisions and bad ones, that was a bad one," said Lance Corporal Bernard's father John. "There is no justification for it. They are about selling newspapers, they are about pictures they are not about honor and service. They are not about honoring the fallen and those who are sacrificing."

But 20 newspapers across the country did publish the photo.

"First of all, this is one of the situations where you can, I think, walk away thinking nobody wins," said Charles Davis with the MU School of Journalism. "I mean, it was a tough photo, tough story. There are going to be a lot of people displeased with the decision to publish. There are going to be a lot of people who see the reason behind deciding to publish. But in no way are you going to get unanimity. I think the newspapers who decided to run it uniformly- I've looked at several of them around the web and as I can understand it, no one ran it out front. Nobody put it on the outside of the paper; everyone ran it on page 4,5,6. Almost all of them ran an explanatory column from the editors or management of the news organization explaining how they came to the decision to run it."

So what do you think, should the Associated Press have released that photo? To give us your thoughts click the link on the left or you can call the Your View Commentline at (573) 884-NEWS.