April 11, 2005

Kevin Sites, Traitor, Gets Journalism Ethics Award

Kevin Sites has his ethics. He put his 'journalistic ethics' above patriotic duty by releasing a video of an American soldier killing an Iraqi who was playing dead.

The proper thing to do would have been to turn the video over to the military authorities for investigation. Had the military never done an investigation, then perhaps Sites should have let this one out of the bag.

This video served as a great propaganda tool for our enemies. Terrorists don't need a Joseph Goebbels as long as they have traitors like Kevin Sites.

From the ever partisan Editor and Publisher:

Kevin Sites, a freelance photojournalist for NBC, will be awarded the 2005 Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism on May 12 for his decision-making process after he witnessed and taped a U.S. Marine killing an unarmed Iraqi man in a mosque.

Sites decided to share the tape with the military, then he worked with NBC to create a "well-nuanced story that aired 48 hours after the incident," according to the Payne announcement. Since he was working as a pool photojournalist at the time, Sites shared the tape with the other news organizations in the pool.

Update: I just noticed something. When Editor and Publisher quoted one of my posts in an article on the Pulitzer fiasco, they didn't drop a link. They simply name my blog and that's it. But for Sites blog they drop a link. Why is that?

As
I wrote several days after the origninal incident:

The second way traitors rationalize their acts of treason is by saying they have an obligation to something higher than country. America is my country, they say, but world stability and peace are a higher duty. It's not so much that I sympathize with Soviet communism, it's that I know the Russians having the bomb will ensure it will never be used again....

Like most traitors, you did not pause to think of the long-term consequences of your actions. I'm sorry, as a journalist you should have known about how the Arab media would have covered this. You should have known that this footage would incite others to murder Americans. There is a reason Muslims around the world hate us, it is because they believe Americans are out to get them. They believe we are in Iraq to steal their oil. They believe American soldiers are just as bad as the terrorists we fight. Your video has just proved this to them....

...stories can be told from more than one angle. And since images are tools of propaganda, then let the images coming out of Iraq serve our purposes and not the purposes of our enemy.

Al Jazeera understands this. This is why the Sites video is shown over and over. This is why the images they show coming out of Iraq are of dead children, burning houses, and of American GIs dead on the streets. What does al Jazeera know about journalism that Kevins Sites does not? Al Jazeera knows that America is their enemy.

Kevin Sites believes that journalism precludes one from having enemies. I do not blame Sites personally for believing this. That is what they teach you at journalism school: journalistic ethics are higher than all other moral obligations....

I trust our military will do the right thing. Give them the tools, and they will win the war. But cameras are also tools of war. Cameras are can be just as deadly as guns. I would not trust a neutral observer to ride around with the Marines carrying a gun. Why would we let one carry around a camera then?

UPDATE: Damn if Charles Johnson and I aren't on the exact same wavelength:

First, AP gets a Pulitzer Prize for anonymous photos of terrorists committing murder, taken under suspicious circumstances.

Then, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes get a Peabody Award for “breaking� the Abu Ghraib story (which had really been “broken� months previously by the US military).

And now, Kevin Sites, who nearly got an innocent Marine charged with murder (for doing the right thing in a war zone), will receive a Payne Award.For Ethics in Journalism...

What do these awards have in common? They’re all for pictures or stories that damaged the US and gave valuable propaganda to the enemy.

Further, he's also right that what Kevin Sites did does not constitute the legal definition of traitor. But I am not a lawyer, so I could care less.

As I've always and consistently maintained, freedom of speech should not exist in war zones. Yes, I believe in censorship. But only in times of war and only speech that is directly related to the war effort. In war we ask people to give up their lives. This is a sacrifice much greater than 'journalistic ethics'.

In WWII we had censorship. Why not now? I believe I will post on this later. Check the main page.