Readers of The New York Times were greeted last Saturday by an unusual sight – a dead body, on page one. The photo, by Reuters' Maxim Zmeyev, was of a victim of the MH17 plane disaster, and showed a pair of legs underneath a sheet of plastic, on top of which had been placed a red flower.

The newspaper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, called it "one of the most beautiful pictures of war I've seen in a long time,” but some readers disagreed, describing the use of the image as “gratuitous”. One reader, Celina Imielinska, said the use of the image was “unthinkable”, particularly as her own mother had died in “another major plane crash”.

Despite perennial accusations of sensationalism, mainstream media have been notably squeamish when it comes to corpses, with a long-standing convention that in the case of war and mass casualty tragedies it is permissible to show everything – smoking ruins, personal possessions, even grieving families – except actual bodies.

But the events of this week – the MH17 disaster and the war in Gaza – appear to have reset the bar.