The Case of Expelled Embed

A U.S. soldier looks through a pair of binoculars while guarding the opening of Amiriya Public Works sub-station in western Baghdad's Amiriya district June 25, 2008.(Mohammed Ameen/Reuters)

From The American Thinker:

In the latest instance of the military's uneasy relationship in Iraq with the news media, U.S. Marine commanders expelled an embedded photojournalist for doing something they considered unforgivable -- snapping grisly photos of dead Marines, and posting them on his website.

The case of photojournalist Zoriah Miller, a 32-year-old American freelancer, has roiled U.S. Marines in Western Iraq for more than a month. Yet the mainstream media has largely ignored the controversy - until that is, a lengthy , "4,000 U.S. Deaths and Just a Handful of Public Images ." While it strove to be circumspect about the issues at play, the Times failed to answer an important question: Who is Zoriah Miller?

Read more ....

My Comment: In writing for this blog, I have come across numerous revealing photos of disfigured and/or body parts of U.S. and coalition soldiers. I have never shown any of them because my altitude is .... it should not be shown. There is a propaganda war that is going on, and I have no interest in giving our enemies the satisfaction that what they are doing is at times successful.

I have shown pictures of Iraqis and Afghans after a suicide blast, but I have always been very careful on what was shown. Though I have been tempted many times, I always left out the more graphic pictures. My reasons for doing this was to always show the savagery of our enemy .... that this is who we are fighting against (but I always did it within limits).

The main stream media is (of course) operating from a double standard, and completely opposite from my own rules of what is to be shown. While I will show some pictures on what the enemy is, the main stream media will want to show graphic pictures of what the American soldier is. For example .... I will show pictures of people falling out of the World Trade Center, the main stream media will not.

I guess it is all a question of what are your opinions in regards to Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and on the evolving political scene in the U.S. This should not be a surprise. What is a surprise is that the aura of objectivity that many in the press always expressed that they were following .... is no longer believed by the public. This lack of trust is now seriously hurting the bottom line of major news organizations as many of their viewers and readers are abandoning them for other sources of information. On the one hand this is a bad thing .... but on the other hand the version of truth that the media likes to portray is now viewed with skepticism .... and this is a good thing.