Whose Side Are Journalists On? (commentary by John McManus) Director of Grade the News, associate of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and author of Market-Driven Journalism: Let the Citizen Beware? "In wartime is the journalist’s first responsibility to flag and country, or to a profession seeking truth regardless of consequences? It’s a popular, but false question. Journalists have always served their country best when they’ve provided as accurate, unflinching reporting as they can. Such reporting may not, of course, serve the war effort nor please generals or the White House. Americans became disaffected with the Viet Nam War only after reporters broke away from Army briefings—the “5 O’clock follies”—and went into the jungle. Their first-hand reports of combat showed the nation just how isolated our GIs were in a hostile land. Had journalists been more “patriotic,” or their access to war as Pentagon-controlled as it has been ever since, the outcome of that struggle would not likely have differed. But the death toll, on both sides, would have risen. Reporting as truthfully as we humans can is never tougher than in a war. Reporters’ objectivity is compromised by being embedded, literally in bed, with sources on one side of the event. Sources on the other side may be shooting at them. Reporters must simply trust the military for information beyond their vantage point.(...)".