Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy Volume 25 Article 4 Issue 1 Symposium on Censorship & the Media 1-1-2012 Staring Death in the Face during Times of War: When Ethics, Law, and Self-Censorship in the News Media Hide the Morbidity of Authenticity Clay Calvert Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndjlepp Recommended Citation Clay Calvert, Staring Death in the Face during Times of War: When Ethics, Law, and Self-Censorship in the News Media Hide the Morbidity of Authenticity, 25 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol'y 87 (2012). Available at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndjlepp/vol25/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. STARING DEATH IN THE FACE DURING TIMES OF WAR: WHEN ETHICS, LAW, AND SELF- CENSORSHIP IN THE NEWS MEDIA HIDE THE MORBIDITY OF AUTHENTICITY CLAY CALVERT* & MIRELIs TORRESt INTRODUCTION Photos are trickier than words, because their content is in large measure emotional, visceral, and because you can't edit their content. That's how Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, succinctly describes the difficulty and dilemma posed in deciding which wartime images newspapers should publish.' A recent, real-life scenario illustrates the problem: during a Taliban ambush in the Helmand province of southern Afghanistan, a U.S.