The copious video, audio and text war coverage flooding over  the transom from Iraq should amount to a clarion call for journalists to remember their roles as gatekeepers.

?It puts an enormous pressure and burden on sorting through information to separate information from journalism,? says Merrill Brown, the senior vice president of Real Networks who was the editor in chief at MSNBC during the coverage of 9/11. ?There?s nothing worse than war and battle to encourage confusion.?

		Some may find it unacceptable to distribute or publish particularly graphic images that can be seen easily by a family member or friend of the dead soldier.

Or to encourage some news outlets to forget that they are more than a distribution system. Yes, journalists in the Gulf and in U.S. newsrooms edit set pieces carefully; but far too much footage flies from camera to satellite to my television or computer screen without any filter. Live coverage of battle is an accident waiting to happen. Remember the car chase that ended up as a televised suicide? War is even more unpredictable.

That doesn?t mean graphic footage of war should never be shown. But it doesn?t have to be shown live to make an impact. It?s OK -- even advisable -- to take a deep breath, then give viewers a choice, even if it goes against every instinct for exclusives and scoops.

It could be argued, and fairly so, that anyone watching streaming video of a battle or an air raid knows what they might see or hear. That would be the exception for me.

It would have been fine with me as a viewer last Saturday if the footage of the aftermath of the attack inside Camp Pennsylvania had been held up just a few minutes instead of shoveled across as quickly as possible.

The flip side, of course, is without the hundreds of U.S. and foreign journalists embedded with the troops, we might never have known the details of this incident. As much fuss as some have made about the independence of such journalists or the possibility of something akin to Stockholm Syndrome, so far I think it is working for the news organizations, and when done right, for viewers, listeners and readers.  Doing it right means viewing their reports as only one part of a constantly changing puzzle.

My initial doubts about stories being censored have been assuaged by the number of reports less than flattering of the military and the coverage of Saturday?s apparent ?fragging.?

News organizations -- gripped by the power of access, the intoxication of speed and the hollow glory of exclusives -- aren?t asking one of the most important questions often enough: Just because we can, should we? With very few exceptions, there should always be a reason beyond that. 

And yet, it was the American media that took a deep breath when faced with one of the most visible ethical challenges of this young war: whether or not to air Iraqi government footage of dead U.S. soldiers and POWs. They held back while colleagues around the world picked up the grotesque video transmitted by Arabic-language network Al-Jazeera and ran with it.

That doesn?t make Al-Jazeera or those who distributed the footage with the network?s permission any less ethical than the U.S. media. (Web site producers who grabbed the exclusive images and posted sans permission are another matter.)  The sensitivities are different -- one network is covering other countries at war while it?s the equivalent of local news for the other.

An Al-Jazeera executive explained later that because the network had been showing graphic images of Iraqis who had been injured or killed, it seemed only right to show the equivalent images of American soldiers. It apparently did not occur to them -- or maybe it did -- that because of the network?s wide distribution agreements, it was quite possible the relatives of those captured might see the video with at least two images of soldiers shot in the forehead before they knew their sons or daughters were missing.

It occurred to the U.S. media, in part because of a Department of Defense policy asking the media not to air or publish the names, images or units of deceased members of the military until the next of kin had been notified, or 72 hours.

The policy also asks that names of POWs not be disclosed until notification is complete, a practice the major news organizations followed, along with declining to show any recognizable shots from the video until the families had been informed. But journalists didn?t follow in lockstep when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked that recognizable video and audio of POWs not be aired or published.

Instead, they exercised judgment, for the most part carefully choosing what to show and how (stills in some cases, snippets of video in others), and more important, explaining to their audiences why each particular decision was made.

Even so, anyone with unfiltered Internet access could see the pictures on Al-Jazeera, and in some cases, watch the footage in its entirety before the U.S. media even chose to show stills of unrecognizable victims. I never found the right link at the network?s site but I was able to view the video at another site. A number of sites grabbed the footage and have made it available as stills and video. At least one site, YellowTimes.org had its service revoked for carrying the footage.  And Al-Jazeera?s Arabic- and English-language sites were hacked.

I could not read the Arabic, but I know how to click on pictures. Doing so brought me to even more graphic images, including a child with his or her head partially missing, and dead American soldiers with holes in their heads lying in pools of blood. I chose to look. Any journalism site using similar images should give their users a choice. The network offered a warning before at least one of its television broadcasts.

Even though it regularly reaches American viewers on the Canadian border, the CBC showed no qualms about using video that might identify POWs before notification. The footage of a flight crew taken prisoner Monday was readily available on CBC.ca?s on-demand newscast before it showed up on the U.S. channels I was watching or on major news Web sites. 

Again, the sensitivities are different. After all, no matter how much Americans and Canadians have in common, this isn?t their war, and it?s not their prisoners or dead. The U.S. media takes care with images of its own but readily show pictures of Iraqi dead or wounded. The CBC might not be so quick to show difficult, recognizable images of Canadian soldiers before their families are notified. Each video that comes in, each picture, each file, each sound bite calls on journalists to make decisions. MSNBC.com editors followed the lead of NBC News, which chose not to air the first POW video prior to notification, and to only air parts of it later. Given that decision, Dean Wright, the site?s editor in chief, says he would not even link to an external stream of the video. Mitch Gelman, a senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com, says his site did the same. 

That seems to fly in the face of the Internet ethos to provide links and allow users to make decisions about where to wander. It is, however, entirely in keeping with the concept of journalists as gatekeepers. If you don?t believe it?s right to show something, then it isn?t right to facilitate seeing it, no matter how accessible to anyone who can use a search engine.

That doesn?t mean another gatekeeper can?t come to a different decision. Situational ethics aren?t absolute. Some may think it unethical to withhold images like the ones in the POW video. After all, images can -- and have -- turned the tide of public emotion. Different people can look at the same video clip and come to quite different conclusions. (I know people whose determination to fight was hardened by pictures that provoked antiwar emotions in others.) Some may find it unacceptable to distribute or publish particularly graphic images that can be seen easily by a family member or friend of the dead soldier.

None of these decisions should be the result of knee-jerk reactions.

It can be hard to think beyond the moment when you?re piling sandbags on the levee. Journalists, at least the ones ultimately responsible for what is published, don?t have that luxury.

Staci D. Kramer is Editor at Large at Cable World and was a contributing editor to Inside.com. Based in University City, Mo., Kramer's clients have included Time, Life, the Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Multichannel News, APBNews.com, mediainfo.com, Editor & Publisher, The Sporting News, St. Louis magazine, several major papers in Canada, and numerous others. Her work has been syndicated by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, reprinted in two books and she has co-produced a segment for "Nightline."