Americans used to not show bodies out of courtesies to families.
I'm not saying they need to zoom in on a dead body floating in the water enough to tell who it was, but enough can be shown or maybe even better described than it has been so people get the sense on the human tragedy there. This didn't seem to be a concern during the tsunami footage when you actually could see people drowning before your very eyes. Sometimes the image carries a lot more weight than a report from someone there on what they say they saw.
When support for the Pacific war in WW11 started to wane, we made it a point to show our dead soldiers floating off the beaches of those miserable islands. Like it or not, it worked.