Sun front page – severed head alert

Bit late in the day now but…

Anyone see the early Sun front page today? (The later edition went with what looked like a hurried lash-up for Robin Williams death)

I will not stick an image up here for reasons of taste – we really don’t need pictures of a seven year old Australian Muslim boy holding the severed head of an alleged Syrian soldier up on this forum any more than we need it on the front of the Sun. In fact, do we need such pictures anywhere in public?
My wife, the youngest two of our children and I walked into Tesco today and, as you may know, the store nearly always has a stand with newspapers on usually placed close to the entrance; on three outward facing display points was this front page so that you could not fail to get the full impact. On asking at the customer service desk what level of offending public decency Tesco was prepared to go to, we were informed that the Sun bought those display positions and would not be impressed if their deal was interfered with. I pointed out that all the copies of the Sun in their pick up rack were all face down, which the customer service manager admitted might have been done by an offended member of staff, and we decided that if no one had complained about not seeing the front page when picking up their paper then maybe that should be the face displayed along the side…

Ok it was not a direct, utterly distinguishable image of a human head since they blacked out the face and put the headline over it – but surely that points to the newspaper identifying the fact that what they were doing was going to offend public decency and trying to water it down a little. The smiling seven year old had a black strip Photoshopped over his eyes, but surely we don’t publish images of living children in newspapers – let alone on the front page – without their families permission, no matter what they have done or where they are from?
The Co-op recently laid down the law to lads mags about offending their customers with sexy/sexist images of women and succeeded in getting them either toned down or bagged up so that the cover was not visible; those that didn’t are no longer stocked, and neither is The Sport (which apparently refused to be censored!).

Anyone got an opinion about the Sun and severed heads? Do you think it would it be a good selling point, and encourage you to buy the paper? Are you fine with the idea of using death porn to sell newspapers or grab attention?