What's Up With That...

Today we are going to explore a moral issue in journalism.
I was searching for information on embedded journalists when I came across an interesting New York Times article. The article, written in 2008, was about how the government is choosing to censor the information that is coming out of war zones and the ways in which succeed in doing it.

An embedded journalist is a journalist from a dedicated news source, like The New York Times or the BBC, who has been allowed to the enter a war zone and integrate themselves in with a troop in order to collect news worthy information of the goings on around them and while the troops are “active”. Since the Vietnam war the government and many media outlets have taken the severity of their war reporting down a notch or two, but how much restriction is too much?
The government uses embed rules to restrict the type and amount of media leaving a war zone. They are able to choose the media outlets they want reporting and furthermore they also choose the journalist within the chosen media outlet that will be able to be embedded with a troop. The troop leaders also have power over where the embeds go and what they are exposed to while they are in the warzone, sometimes for the safety of the journalist but also sometimes because the military commander doesn't want certain things seen and reported on. More often than not, military commanders have found ways to either hinder the news gathering process or have the journalist removed entirely from there troop.

So the question is, should the government have so much control over the media that should be coming out of war zones? Should the government be able to restrict information from the American people, the people who have given themselves or a family member or friend to the war? Should the American people be kept from a war that has sent them into a financial crisis?

Read for yourself at:
4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images by Micheal Kamber and Time Arango
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/world/middleeast/26censor.html?ex=1374811200&en=9903da4b22e064a4&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Embed Rules
http://www.defense.gov/news/Feb2003/d20030228pag.pdf