AP Photo/Keith Srakocic Vice President Mike Pence, right, stands with State Representative Rick Saccone after a fundraising event ahead of next week's special election for Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district S ometimes I try to imagine what we'd be going through right now if a few thousand votes had gone a different way in 2016 and Hillary Clinton had won the electoral college in addition to the popular vote. There would have no doubt been a conservative uprising along the lines of the Tea Party, presented as a principled opposition to big government but really little more than a collective loathing for President Clinton. Not that she would have been turning the nation into a socialist hellhole, since with Republicans still in control of Congress there would only have been so much she could accomplish. We probably would have had at least one or two government shutdowns by now, and Republicans would be demanding deep cuts to federal spending, lest we subject our grandchildren to...

(Twitter: @Melody_Ball) A screenshot from a cell phone video by a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. T he school shooting last week in Parkland, Florida, was unlike other mass shootings in one remarkable way: Many of the students disseminated images of the event on social media as it was still unfolding. That included some videos in which the bodies of victims could be seen, which confronted the news media with a problem they have been grappling with for as long as photographs have been reproduced in the news. Should they show dead bodies? Is it necessary information, or is it too upsetting for audiences to see? Does it enhance or detract from the story? What principles should guide those decisions? Jessica Fishman, a behavioral and social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, explores these issues in her new book, Death Makes the News: How News Media Censor and Display the Dead , for which she analyzed large volumes of news coverage, and also interviewed...