War journalists must preserve integrity

Fox News’ mustached maverick, Geraldo Rivera, has left Iraq after possibly jeopardizing… Fox News’ mustached maverick, Geraldo Rivera, has left Iraq after possibly jeopardizing American troops by drawing a map and diagram of maneuvers in the sand on a live broadcast.

Jesse Lynch, a 19-year-old Army private, was rescued from a hospital where she was imprisoned and possibly tortured.

U.S. troops are closing in on Baghdad, foot by painful foot.

This week, Time Magazine dubbed NBC’s Patricia Sabga “Satellite Dish” and gave her a three-out-of-four microphones rating.

All these factoids, so urgently impinging on our daily lives through CNN, the Instant Messenger ticker or e-mail headline updates fall under the rubric of micronews, flashes of humanity from “over there” that have little to do with the reality of conflict.

This is a new age of war.

Since even the last conflict in Iraq, technology has expanded with a velocity no one could have foreseen, bombarding us with information every second of the day.

The media are experiencing growing pains getting acclimated to this barrage of knowledge. In many cases, they are failing to prioritize.

The amount of news available to journalists is almost unlimited, and Americans at home are suffering their own battle fatigue, watching every gruesome detail of war from the couch, without any framework into which we can set the violence and horror.

Media outlets have a responsibility, not just to starkly report every item they ferret out, but also to make some judgment calls, to place sound- and video-bytes into context.

As much as pundits, legislators and armchair generals have been chomping at the bit to provide a pat analysis of our current conflict, it’s impossible to overlook a basic fact of history: Responsible analysis is a product of hindsight.

Only after years separate us from this war can we begin to make sense of it, to judge mistakes and triumphs in the full light of history’s progression.

That fact does not excuse current journalists, embedded or otherwise, from attempting to make some on-the-spot conclusions. That’s known as responsible journalism.

When a Fox News correspondent who no longer has an incendiary talk show to play with makes news himself by potentially dooming the division he’s informally embedded with, journalistic integrity suffers.

When a bright, ambitious young woman being saved from the clutches of terror becomes tokenized by overreporting, journalistic integrity suffers.

No journalist can be perfect, but each one must sift through the innumerable items they encounter before dumping them on our plates here at home.