How Vigorously Should War Correspondents Cover the Enemy?

From CBS News Public Eye:

This week, Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware appeared on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. (You can read the transcript of the interview here, or listen to the MP3.) Ware, a native Australian who I spoke to in September, has lived and worked in Afghanistan and Iraq since shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He has spent far more time in the region than the vast majority of foreign-born reporters, and has covered not just coalition forces but also Iraqi insurgents and Islamic jihadists.

In the interview, Hewitt asked Ware about the "morality" of spending time with and covering the insurgents and jihadists, and said he "would prefer that [Ware] not report on the insurgents." Here is one of Hewitt's questions:

No, but it does, however, get to the question of whether or not media from the West should be...what's the right word, Michael Ware? It's not assisting, but providing information flow to the jihadis about whom I'm quite comfortable, and I think most Westerners are quite comfortable, just declaring to be evil, because they kill innocents, and that killing of innocents is evil, is it not, Michael? (ellipses in transcript)

Putting aside Hewitt's construction, in which he turns a question about what the media should be doing into one about whether or not the "killing of innocents is evil" – and, full disclosure here, I've tussled with Hewitt in the past – I think it's worth exploring Hewitt's larger point, which has to do with the role of Western-affiliated journalists in a war.

(There is more.)