Every morning, emaciated parents with emaciated children stagger into Banadir Hospital, a shell of a building with floors that stink of diesel fuel because that is all the nurses have to fight off the flies. Babies are dying because of the lack of equipment and medicine. Some get hooked up to adult-size intravenous drips — pediatric versions are hard to find — and their compromised bodies cannot handle the volume of fluid.

The image has generated its fair share of buzz today. And it raises some interesting questions about the enduring role (and value) of still photographs in the modern-media landscape:

Why did the Times run that photo?

The graphic quality of Hicks’ photo certainly matches the stark portrait painted by Gettleman’s reporting. And executive editor Bill Keller told Salon that the choice to feature the image so prominently was uncontroversial in the Times newsroom: “We’d already decided to front Jeffrey’s powerful story, and it would have felt like journalistic malfeasance not to include Tyler’s powerful photography,” he said. “I know many readers found the picture disturbing. That’s good. The deaths of thousands of Somali children ought to disturb us, at least.”

Keller argued that the use of graphic photography does not equate to sensationalism: “We prize photographs that deserve and demand attention. Sometimes they do it with unusual composition, sometimes with wit or incongruity, and sometimes they do it by looking at death, hunger, disease or other misery close up.”

The United Nations declared a famine in Somalia two weeks ago, but the story has largely been overshadowed here by the debt-ceiling debacle, the Norway massacre and allegations of phone hacking at a Rupert Murdoch tabloid. (The Atlantic Wire notes the disparities in coverage of all these stories in convenient graph form.) According to another Times story, which ran Monday, humanitarian groups have struggled to raise money for aid, in part because of the famine’s limited media profile.

“I’m asking myself where is everybody and how loud do I have to yell and from what mountaintop,” said Caryl Stern, chief executive of the United States Fund for Unicef, a fund raising arm for the organization. “The overwhelming problem is that the American public is not seeing and feeling the urgency of this crisis.”

But is the photograph enough to change anything?

Some of modern history’s most significant moments are writ large through iconic photographs. Try, for example, to imagine the Vietnam War without the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, or without the horrific reality shown through “Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief.” And photography has often brought new awareness to under-covered tragedies, as it does now for Somalia.

But one question that lingers over the Hicks photograph — along with many others in a post-9/11, post-Abu Ghraib world — is how much punch a singular image still packs. It’s remarkably simple to avoid unpleasant images in the modern media landscape. You can imagine the number of people who simply gloss over stories showing servicemen and -women in fatigues, because of wariness toward depressing combat stories. And the media often operates in lockstep. As Al Jazeera veteran Paige Austin noted this week [via HuffPost]: 

It is well documented that when it comes to war and tragedy abroad, the American media’s tendency is to sanitize violence, showing none of the outrage and carnage evident in media accounts outside the United States.

Perhaps the attention generated by the Hicks photograph — an arresting image that’s hard to avoid if you’ve been anywhere near the Times today — will help generate more attention for the atrocities in Somalia. It’s certainly boosted awareness of the famine. But maybe we’re attaching too much significance to a photograph on its own. More important is that people understand the story behind the picture, argues Susie Linfield, NYU professor and author of “The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence.” 

“One of the problems with an image is that it can’t explain [context]. You can see a child starving, but you need the words to explain who is the culprit,” which, in this case, was Somali militants. “[The Times piece] was a very effective combination of image and text.”

The fate of the child from the photo is unclear. “[Gettleman and Hicks] said they were operating under tight constraints and weren’t able to follow up on the extreme cases like the child in the photo,” according to Keller. “They think the prognosis was not good.” 

The piece is just factually wrong. First of all, the Project for Excellence in Journalism tracked Obama-Romney media coverage this year and found that the president received far more negative coverage than Romney did. GQ’s Devin Gordon took apart VandeHei and Allen here. He said everything I wanted to about the piece – most notably, the Times took the lead in reporting on Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, starting with Jodi Kantor’s piece in April, 2007. Gordon found 2,950 references to Wright in the Times archives. Even if Gordon’s math is off by a factor of 10, that’s a lot of coverage.

Politico’s faux-outrage that both the Post and Times “ignored” David Maraniss’s story about Obama epic high school weed-smoking is silly, too: The future president inoculated himself against almost all drug revelations by revealing them himself in “Dreams from My Father.” The memoir leaves little doubt that Barry Obama was a lost stoner in high school. Who cares?

Meanwhile, Matt Drudge’s favorite journalists are angry that the Post published revelations about Romney’s high school bullying. They seem to think high school behavior matters in the case of Obama but not Romney, just another example of the pervasive partisan double standard in media. But I don’t want to say I learned nothing from the piece: It features populist Haley Barbour defending Ann Romney from the mean Times this way: “The New York Times does a huge exposé that Ann Romney rides horses. Well, so does my wife, and a few million other people. Watch out for equine performers!” You are so fricking losing the dressage vote, Team Obama! Take that!

The ultimate moral vacuum at the heart of the story is its failure to care that just two days after its “exposé” of Ann Romney’s fondness for seven-figure horses and the silly costumes that go with them, the Times ran a chilling investigative piece about Obama’s “kill list” process, with damning details about how the president decides on drone strikes and other methods of killing suspected terrorists.

The Times piece revealed that the administration has minimized its reported civilian casualties by counting all males killed, including minors, as “militants.” It contains the detail that echoes George Zimmerman’s thoughts about Trayvon Martin – that any young men in the vicinity of suspected terrorists must be “up to no good.” The single most haunting revelation, to me, was the fact that political guru David Axelrod sits in on the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, evidence that the president’s process is at least partly political. Oh, and “Terror Tuesday” isn’t my juvenile label for the meetings; according to the Times, that’s how they’re known in the White House. I hope they got that detail wrong. It even quotes Bush CIA director Michael Hayden praising the president but urging a little more transparency in his process. When a Bush-Cheney intelligence operative is telling you you’re keeping too many secrets, you maybe ought to think about it. (I’m going to write more about Obama, the Democrats, national security and “kill lists” next week.)

Politico’s only mention of the piece comes within Times editor Richard Stevenson’s email rebuttal to its charges. Clearly, VandeHei and Allen think a story about the president’s controversial drone policy is less grave and potentially damaging than a close look at Ann Romney’s dressage hobby. I can’t think of a better example of the mindset that drives trivial, democracy-degrading political coverage. Politico didn’t create that world, but it’s the news outlet that was most deliberately invented and perfected to make sure we continue to live in it.

But his columns continued, and continue, to run at UPI, which, like the Times, is owned by the conservative (and culty) Unification Church. A new column went up just yesterday, in fact. It seems to follow proper rules of attribution and quotation marks, at least upon a cursory examination. As does this May 17 UPI column, which avoids being precisely plagiarism through extensive use of quotation marks — making it incredibly apparent that 90 percent of the column is promotional material from the website of something called the “Challenge Network.” (Seriously, nearly every paragraph is made up primarily of quoted material.)

De Borchgrave’s defense has been a) that this is all just a big misunderstanding and b) that he is very, very well-respected and accomplished. The “misunderstanding” is that he thought it was OK to take stuff from websites and blogs because, who cares? (“What’s the problem? If memory serves, [it came from] a blog,” he told Wemple.) But the real meat of his defense is the second point, as he has repeatedly made clear. Don’t you know who Arnaud de Borchgrave is? Here is de Borchgrave’s “vindication,” as reported by Patrick Gavin in Politico:

Please inform Mr. [Llewellyn] King that I have been the happy recipient of scores of supporting letters from prominent personalities, ranging from Marvin Kalb to Jim Jones, Zbig Brzezinski, Judge Bill Sessions, who understand that inadvertently dropping quotation marks was not plagiarism. The column I wrote yesterday prompted more favorable responses — including Marvin Kalb — from prominent Washington players.

No one who refers to Zbigniew Brzezinski as “Zbig” could possibly be a lowly plagiarist!

He followed up with additional supporting evidence of his innocence:

Yesterday’s column which prompted favorable responses throughout the day yesterday, beginning with Marvin Kalb. If I can pass muster with the dean of American journalism, and scores of other prominent personalities on both sides of the aisle, I can only assume that the nay sayers are not acquainted with all the facts in this case.

De Borchgrave’s columnizing is a sort of soft semi-retirement. The Unification Church and his think tank pay him money for little weekly columns that no one will ever read; he gets to pretend he is still an important journalist, and they get to be associated with a respected old man who has very powerful friends. De Borchgrave is — understandably — confused as to why anyone would accuse him of plagiarism. He’s an award-winning D.C. fixture with a long and storied career, not some undergrad journalism major! Plagiarism is what unimportant people do. Friends of Marvin Kalb make minor attribution errors.

I predict UPI will continue to run his columns, even if the elements in the Washington Times who wish for that paper to be taken more seriously succeed in excising him from their roster of columnists.

So, Beyonce and company, I can only imagine the disconnect you feel, seeing yourself all squishy after having that baby of yours, and the pressure you must be under. But I am begging you all, knock it off. The world already will hold you under a cruel microscope the second you dare to step out in public. So, Miss Sasha Fierce, you don’t have to joke, as you did during your comeback gig this past weekend, “Y’all have no idea how hard I worked! I had to lose 60 pounds. They had me on that treadmill. I ate lettuce!” Adding that you’re now going to get “chocolate wasted” doesn’t mitigate the message. This is what one does after having a baby: One gets on a treadmill and eats lettuce.

The stampede from sexy, pregnant and naked on a magazine cover to instant bikini body has become a celebrity rite of passage. Last year, Mariah Carey promptly flaunted her abs for Shape — and became a Jenny Craig spokesperson after giving birth to her twins. After having her two children, Melissa Joan Hart — tired of “blogs about me discussing how fat I’ve become” — dropped down to 113 pounds and did the bikini cover for People. Jamie Pressly did one for Shape. Kendra Wilkinson did it for OK! a mere eight weeks after giving birth, showing off both her “easy diet” and her infant. Elisabeth Hasselback appeared on Fitness, swearing she “lost weight without dieting.” Jennifer Lopez showed up on Us, smiling that she had her “best body ever” after her twins. Jessica Simpson hasn’t yet debuted her post-baby body, but her deal with Weight Watchers suggests she won’t be letting herself go all “fat Betty Draper.” Instead she’ll be more January Jones. And Heidi Klum, a multi-time champion of the Skinny Mom Olympics, did a Victoria’s Secret show five weeks after having her daughter Lou. Five weeks!

At five weeks after giving birth, you’re still sitting on inflatable donuts and junk is leaking out of your yoni. If you’re breastfeeding, your rack is engorged, and your nipples are cracked and caked with Lansinoh. Assuming you haven’t had a C-section tummy tuck, your abs look like raw pizza dough. And if you don’t have a personal trainer, it’s going to be like this for a while. That’s the reality of new motherhood.

So what’s the hurry? You could instead be like former Shape magazine cover girl Jenna Fischer, who, after the birth of her son last fall, sanely said:

There’s so much pressure on you as a new mom that the last thing you need to have hanging over your head is some expectation of what your body is supposed to look like. I actually think that the scrutiny of new mothers’ bodies has gotten out of control. Every new mother just gets a free pass. I’m actually angered by the “posing in a bikini six weeks after having my baby” [trend]… Who cares if our boobs are hanging low and we have a little more junk in the trunk? We created a human being, everybody. Let’s celebrate!

This is why Jenna Fischer is fantastic. Sure, being honest and focusing your energy on stuff like getting some rest and taking care of your new baby means you might not make the cover of MILF Monthly. And you might, like Jennifer Garner, have the gossip pages wonder when you’ll ever lose the baby weight a whopping two months after you’ve given birth to your third child. But consider the healthy role model you could be to other mothers — and to your own children.

A woman can have a baby and, in time, be just as fit as she was before. But it’s not a competition. It’s not a race. And the tabloid obsessiveness about mothers and their bodies – and the celebrity culture that feeds into it – is not just unnatural, it’s unhealthy. It tells women that their value in the world, even after the miracle of childbirth, is always exactly how bangable they are. Real life should not be an Alan Tudyk scene from “Knocked Up.” (It should be an Alan Tudyk scene from “Firefly,” but that’s another story.) And right after having a child, any woman — even Beyonce herself — should be entitled to a little extra jelly.

The Cupp photo exists as a “celebrity fantasy” – i.e., an imaginary hate bang. And though Hustler takes pains to cover its butt, noting that “No such picture of S.E. Cupp actually exists. This composite fantasy is altered from the original for our imagination, does not depict reality, and is not to be taken seriously for any purpose,” it ponders, grossly, “What would S.E. Cupp look like with a dick in her mouth?”

Of course, the usual conservative suspects have come out of the woodwork for this one, pointing an accusatory finger at what the Blaze helpfully refers to as “the liberal media” for this. Yes, the American Prospect, Mother Jones, Hustler – it’s all the same to us! On Wednesday, Glenn Beck begged, “Is this wrong, Democrats? Is this wrong?” — as if Democrats were responsible for what Hustler publishes. Who put that penis in that lady’s mouth? Probably Obama. And Cupp herself, on Beck’s show, seized the opportunity to condemn the National Organization for Women, and to add, “I wish that these media entities that perform this kind of misogyny would just come out and do what Hustler did, instead of beating around the bush and pretending to be fair, pretending to be above that. They’re not above that. This is exactly what they do every single time.”

Way to seize the moment, Cupp — except that liberals don’t like fake blow-job putdowns either. Nor do you see a lot of them out there in, say, the Nation. Want proof from the despised “liberal media”? How about how Audrey Ference explained in the L Magazine, “It’s Not Cool to Photoshop a Dick into a Woman’s Mouth, Even if You Disagree With Her Ideas. In These Times’ Lindsay Beyerstein, meanwhile, condemned the photo as “beneath contempt.” And on Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan noted that “More than 50 years after the women’s movement began, we’re still trying to silence women with dicks.” Even the always combative hosts of “The View” unanimously welcomed Cupp Thursday, with Whoopi Goldberg saying,  “This is offensive. This is not the dialogue that we have when we disagree.” So Cupp and company, please extend your detractors the courtesy of believing that we think this is gross too? True liberals don’t pretend that degradation is social commentary.

Flynt, for his part, defends the photo, saying “That’s satire” in an email to the Daily Caller. That “satire,” by the way, consists of the aforementioned blow-job pic, accompanied by the sad commentary that Cupp’s “hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp’s suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy.”

It’s pretty obvious that a company whose porn movies are cleverly titled “This Ain’t” – as in “This Ain’t Celebrity Apprentice” and “This Ain’t Dancing With the Stars” — is not trying terribly hard to distinguish itself from the people it’s lampooning. Also: apparently “Dancing With the Stars” porn is a thing. So Hustler may hide behind the false equivalency that sticking a penis in Cupp’s mouth because she hates Planned Parenthood is the same as its movie parodies or its glorious, long ago triumph of putting Jerry Falwell in an outhouse. But it’s not. It’s a photo of a real person, for starters, which means it can and likely will be distributed across the Internet pell mell and willy nilly without its disclaimer. Second, it’s exactly the kind of crap women have to contend with on a near constant basis — that we exist to be objectified, screwed and shut up.

Sticking a penis in the mouth of a woman whose opinions you don’t like isn’t satire, especially when you’re in the business of putting penises in women’s mouths all the time. It’s aggressive. Worse, it’s stupid. But at least both the image and the lame excuse for it achieve something Hustler and editors know a lot about. They suck mightily.

Note, for example, how the show’s star Joel McHale spent the spring diplomatically – and wittily — handling the talk-show circuit after Chase’s meltdown, joking that the voice mail had to be fake because “there’s no way Chevy could figure out voice mail.” See, it’s glib and funny and sounds magically off-the-cuff! Get it? The cast of “Community” — which includes the incredibly on-the-ball Danny Pudi, Alison Brie and Donald Glover – knows how to handle itself.

So here’s what you don’t do. You don’t send an email saying you “wanted to forward some messaging we hope our cast will find helpful as they navigate questions that will undoubtedly come up.” Oh God, “forward some messaging.” This won’t be good. And sure enough, in a memo obtained Wednesday by the Hollywood Reporter, the talking points sent from Sony to the cast reads like a ransom note. A poorly written one. My friend Jay at the Takeaway suggests reading it in the dean’s voice, but in my head, I can’t hear anyone but Chang.

“We’re hoping that the news will lose some steam over the next day, especially if we’re not perpetuating the topic in any way,” it reads. Then it goes on to suggest the cast just tell the press, “We’re also excited that we’ll be back on NBC’s schedule in the fall and are looking forward to working on those episodes,” “I am looking forward to starting our next 13 episodes of ‘Community,’” “We’re looking forward to working with David Guarascio & Moses Port on a new season of ‘Community.’” Also, guess what? “We’re looking forward to the stories our characters will find themselves in come Sept.” I’m not sure I even understand that last sentence, but you get the gist. Coming this fall! “Community”! REMAIN CALM AND STOP PERPETUATING THE TOPIC.

As one Hollywood Reporter commenter brilliantly opined, maybe now “the cast will all recite the entire memo, verbatim, in interviews. Like hostages reading off cue cards.” It’s just like when Avery Jessup had to do the news in North Korea! Wait, what well-regarded yet low-rated NBC sitcom are we talking about here?

This kind of thing is insulting on so many levels. Primarily, it’s a dis to the cast and team of “Community,” who this weekend managed to tweet gracefully their gratitude to Dan Harmon and his “dementedly awesome brain” without coming off like network-destroying loose cannons. And don’t even get me started on how idiotic Sony must assume the press is to send out something like this. Guys, it’s not all one big Mario Lopez-fueled parade of butt-kissing out there. Worst of all, it’s a shameless slap to fans, who expect that the people who give us a weird treasure like “Community” know how to be funny and sarcastic and sad and real when there is a major shakeup in their ranks — oh, and who also know enough about social media to know you can’t stop a dumb email from getting around. It’s not about sticking to some rote company line. It’s about cultivating the very authenticity that makes “Community” so friggin’ special, and respecting the fans who watch it. And it’s about getting that the title of the show isn’t just about a mythical college. It’s about us.