Images of the devastation wreaked by the Asian tsunami may bring home the extent of the tragedy, but do they also undermine the dignity of the victims? Nick Morrison looks at how the disaster is pushing back the boundaries of bad taste.

ROWS of corpses line the floor of a makeshift mortuary, barely covered by what passes for body bags. Bodies loosely wrapped in plastic sheeting, their limbs and clothing clearly visible, are lowered into a mass grave. Muddied and bloated bodies are scattered among the floating debris of their homes.

Pictures of the horrors left in the wake of the tsunami in south-east Asia have dominated newspapers and television news programmes in the 12 days since disaster struck, images of the survivors and the grief-stricken jostling for space alongside the dead.

They are images which have been credited with galvanising the unprecedented public response, in both donations and sympathy, as the scale of the tragedy unfolded. But some of them are also images which would have been deemed inappropriate for public viewing just a few years ago.

It was just over three years ago that many newspapers and television stations were criticised for showing pictures of people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Centre. Now, the swollen and recognisable corpses of the drowned are considered acceptable, opening up a debate, not only over how far this boundary should be pushed, but also over whether there is a different standard applied to pictures of western and Asian victims.

Newspapers and television stations have a difficult job in selecting images for use, but there is no doubt that recent years have seen the shattering of a former taboo, says Philip Young, senior lecturer in journalism and media ethics at Sunderland University.

"We expect them to give a truthful and accurate account of what is happening, but at the same time we expect them to act as a gatekeeper and only give us what we can cope with," he says.

'Images of death were reasonably uncommon a few decades ago, but that taboo has been broken quite regularly."

He says the advent of 24-hour news, both on television and the Internet, has increased the number of images and has brought previously unacceptable pictures into the mainstream. As more of these images become available, we become used to seeing them, and less shocked when they appear.

"The challenge is to tell the story but still retain some dignity for the people involved," he says.

"At the same time, it is vitally important that the full horror of what is happening is put to the public, and we would not have had the huge public response if people hadn't seen those images."

Guardian Readers' Editor Ian Mayes, who addresses the issue in his weekly column in the paper tomorrow, says one of the most controversial pictures, of bodies in a military hospital in Banda Aceh, attracted only one complaint.

"It was obviously a distressing picture, but in the context of the scale of death caused by the tsunami, I think it was perfectly justified.

"Even though the pictures that we used were extending the boundaries of what had hitherto been thought permissible and appropriate, people accepted that, in this context, it was right to take readers in this direction," he says.

But showing some dead bodies does not mean any picture of a body is acceptable, and some of the more grotesque images of swollen corpses have been rejected for publication, he says.

"I do not see the point of using those. There are offensive and a further assault on the dignity of the people who have been killed to use," he says.

But he defends the use of one particularly graphic image.

"It was of Banda Aceh and it showed an area of coastal devastation and wreckage and as you looked at it you realised it was totally embedded with bodies, and the more you looked at it you realised there were bodies everywhere.

"The idea of the fragility of the human tenure on Earth was brought home extremely forcibly by that picture," he says.

He says the increasingly explicit pictures are reacting to how close readers want to go, but acknowledges there is a danger of pushing the boundary back too far.

"I think the pictures we used still represent a healthy degree of restraint, but we have got to be very careful that we don't just collapse towards a gratuitous use of images of dead people," he adds.

But the use of graphic pictures also raises another dilemma: whether victims of different races are being accorded the same level of respect.

"Are we treating non-white victims of disasters with the same kind of values that we are treating white or European victims?," asks Mr Mayes.

Privately, the BBC recognises there is an inconsistency over its readiness to show Asian dead, a readiness which is not deemed appropriate when the victims are white, an issue expected to be addressed in the corporation's review of its tsunami coverage.

But a BBC spokesman says the decision to show graphic footage was taken after research showed the public thought the television coverage of the Iraq war had been over-sanitised.

"It led to much discussion over whether it was remiss and were we presenting the real scenario?, and that has led to a little more graphic imagery. It would be remiss of us not to show the full horror here.

"But we would not do this irresponsibly, and consideration is given to all the pictures we see, and due notice is given, and will continue to be given, when anything sensitive is broadcast," he says.

But a willingness to show dead Asians which is not there when dead whites are concerned, is not confined to the BBC, argues Philip Young.

"Regrettably, we have a culture where the further away it is, the more unpleasant an image we're prepared to see," he says.

He cites the images of the Beslan atrocity last year, where we saw children's blood-soaked bodies without knowing whether they were alive or dead, and grief-stricken families who were clearly unhappy at being photographed, and compares it with the Dunblane massacre of 1996, when newspapers and broadcasters were, by and large, praised for their restraint in not intruding on grief.

Similarly, the response to the tsunami contrasts sharply with that to both 9/11 and the Iraq war.

"We saw pictures of people jumping, but very few of us have seen pictures of bodies from 9/11 - it was too close to home," he says. "And in Iraq, what is effectively a man-made problem, we're less prepared to confront what has happened than the natural disaster in south Asia."

But although there is now an expectation of seeing images that 20 years ago would have been considered unacceptable, he does not believe this means newspapers and television stations have embarked on an unstoppable journey to see who can show the most gruesome picture.

"I think what we're looking for is a degree of honesty, but that doesn't mean we want to look into every corner. A lot of us do look away, and we don't want to see those things," he says. "What we want to do is understand, and as long as the pictures help understand what is happening, there will be an audience for them."