IN WHAT can only be described as an overheated article in this column last Tuesday, Padraig Conway, honorary secretary of the Irish Theological Association, addressed the publication on September 6th of photographs of Michael Brady, on the front pages of this newspaper and the Irish Independent.

The pictures were taken shortly after Mr Brady was shot dead in Dublin the previous night. He was the eighth person to be murdered by hitmen in Dublin this year. Padraig Conway takes exception to the publication of the photographs and uses the opportunity to air some of his own prejudices about the media.

Dismissing explanations for using the pictures, he says: "I would be more comfortable if editors simply said they published the photographs of Michael Brady because to do otherwise might wipe out their sales in terms of the opposition."

No doubt he would, but in saying so he betrays an all too prevalent view of the media, particularly in the non secular world. That the reality is quite different in the main and that the assumption of such blanket baseness is always unjust does not seem to exercise his conscience at all.

The media are not without fault and their faults are there for all to see every day, unlike many other institutions. But to suggest that sales are their sole concern cannot be allowed to pass. It also shows little understanding of our two main daily newspapers or those who buy them.

The readerships of this newspaper and the Irish Independent are hardly the sort of people who will be persuaded to buy either by a graphic front page photograph. Similarly, tabloid readers are unlikely to be swayed into buying either broadsheet by such pictures.

The public can be fickle but they are not silly, as Padraig Conway suggests. Indeed, his "sales" assertion illustrates as much about his views of the public as it does about his prejudices about the media.

HE REJECTS the "greater good" justification for using the photographs as highlighting an ignored epidemic of such murders; "it is their [the media's] pretence of which problematic".

I feel it necessary to explain his grounds for asserting this "pretence". It is simply assumed, then proven.

"That it is pretence," he continues, "becomes more obvious when we examine the type of image most frequently used to achieve good effect.

"We have unnamed starving Binfrans, Ethiopians and Somalis dying in front of our electronic eyes. We have unnamed pubescent Vietnamese girls screaming in napalm induced agony as they run through village streets. Why don't we have photographs of coronary fatalities with a history of smoking, taken in their last agony, to convince us of the ills of tobacco addiction?"

He wonders why there are not close up pictures of the torn genuitalia of rape victims or of car crash victims. He tells us it is a them and us situation with the media, "them", being the perpetrators of crime who are deemed suitable for demonisation. "This is what makes it legitimate to publish photographs of "them" on our front pages", "them" to include "the image of Michael Brady" which would be "unthinkable" if it was one of "us".

Even the "good effect" pictures do not escape his ire. "Africans will often not respond with gratitude for the good achieved by photographs of their starving sisters and brothers," he says. Ought gratitude to be the object? Was it gratitude which motivated Michael Buerk of the BBC when he made his broadcast from Ethiopia in 1986? Some would suggest compassion.

Was it gratitude which prompted the photographer from Life magazine to take that picture of a terror stricken little Vietnamese girl (why the word "pubescent"? Is Padraig Conway implying yet another perfidy on the part of the media?) running from US induced agony? Some might suggest outrage.

Was it demonisation which led to a picture of the assassinated Bobby Kennedy appearing on front pages all over the world, on June 7th, 1968? Some might suggest horror at the increasingly violent nature of society, joust as with Michael Brady. But compassion", "outrage" and "horror" are moral words and everyone knows the moral finds no home in the media. Ask Padraig Conway.

As for pictures of those dying due to the frailties of addiction and torn genitalia et al ... if the media were as Padraig Conway suggests, we should be seeing such pictures every day. That we don't ought to give him pause for thought.

He argues that the publication of Mr Brady's picture robbed him, his family and friends of "respect". It also robbed the reader "of something intimate and precious".

He arrives at this curious conclusion through some odd logic: 1. The assumption: "Surely everyone who saw that photograph has their own memory of the first instant of looking at the corpse of someone they loved."

2. The proof (a): "In that instant is contained something that is uniquely and irreducibly mine." 3. The proof (b): "If I am forced to share that moment with the general public, I am robbed, literally of my private life." 4. The conclusion: "I will find it hard not to feel that my dignity as a person is diminished."

In this way, the publication of Michael Brady's picture robbed Padraig Conway of his dignity as a person. It dehumanised him, this "sensationalism", this "contemporary version of the decapitated heads on the walls of Dublin castle". In such ways do journalists behave "in a criminal like fashion", he would have us believe.

ONE has to wonder just who is being demonised by such logic. That Padraig Conway has wilfully, and with little foundation other than personal assumption, turned a worthy intent into a criminal act does not seem to occur to him or trouble him at all.

He goes on. "When an image like this is set on the printed page, the reader's capacity for empathy is set at nil; there is no space left for it to work. Far from heightening awareness, this sensationalism leads to a general deadening of experience."

One has to wonder whether Padraig Conway has ever been inside a Catholic church. There he will witness such images as no newspaper would dare print in any other context.

Has seeing the image of the crucified Christ, his corpse nailed through hands and feet, blood streaming down his face from a halo of thorns crushed into his skull, his side streaming blood from the centurion's wound, robbed Padraig Conway of his dignity as a person and "literally, of my private life."?

Has the graphic sensationalism of the step by step savagery of Christ's Journey to Calvary, amid all those unnamed" people in the Stations of the Cross deadened his sensibility? Have those numerous Pieta type statues of Mary holding the naked adult corpse of her son set his capacity for empathy at nil? And why no pictures/ statues of the battered and bruised body of the woman stoned for adultery? Has he ever asserted that the employment of such graphic imagery by the Catholic Church is merely about attracting greater numbers?

Probably not. Few would. But he has no problem in attributing such cynicism of intent to the media, where there is no good.