WORK THE ETHICS

I was fascinated to read the various reports on the President's trip to Baghdad and see journalists and pseudo-journalists scrambling to try to find a way to portray it in a negative light. I've been a broadcast reporter for nearly 30-years and believe me there is no group of people more full of their own self importance outside of Hollywood anywhere on Earth than journalists- thank God.

This was the blurb that got me from a story syndicated from the Washington Post:
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, criticized the White House correspondents who made the trip without spilling the secret. "That's just not kosher," he said. "Reporters are in the business of telling the truth. They can't decide it's okay to lie sometimes because it serves a larger truth or good cause."

Huh? First off, what reporter lied? If reporters don't report, is that lying? What nonsense.

There are so many scenarios when reporters don't report facts for the greater good it's silly even to debate it. We don't report names of murder victims, car accident fatalities, and others until their families have been notified out of a sense of decency. We don't report the names of rape victims, we don't do stories on suicides, and we withhold the names of children accused of crimes for much the same reason. War correspondents (Geraldo Rivera being the exception) don't report our troop positions. We don't report bomb threats - unless actual devices are found - because it will only result in panic and more bomb threats. There are technologies used by law enforcement agencies which reporters have been made aware of by police, but the existence of those devices is not reported because to do so would only give an advantage to criminals.

To charge that reporters lied by not disclosing the exact whereabouts of this country's leader when to do so would have only have ruined a wonderful opportunity to inspirit the troops risking their lives to preserve the very freedoms these self appointed ethics experts rely upon - not to mention that it could have put our President, our troops and quite possibly our nation at risk - is a sickening and thinly veiled attempt to cloak a liberal agenda behind heretofore unseen and unpracticed journalistic principals.

Yes, the public does have a right to know, but the public also knows what's right.

That's no lie.