question, but I am highly skeptical of this position. I suspect if nothing is said one way or the other, most viewers would likely assume footage is provided by news crews or simply not think about the question at all, since I do not believe most Americans are aware there is no other way the footage could have been acquired: the constraints on reporting this war are new to this war. (This is based in part on the anecdotal experience of a number of public presentations on the topic. In my experience, audiences, including military audiences, are inevitably surprised to learn network visual material is sourced in this way.) Networks now air footage of low, amateurish quality in any number of circumstances, most often when the footage is of breaking news events and has been provided by so-called "citizen-journalists"—in other words, people who just happened to be in the vicinity with a cell phone camera and had the wits to start filming when something newsworthy happened in front of them. If audiences think about this footage at all, most people probably assume it falls in that category and that it was shot by American soldiers, in other words by those targeted by the attack, not by those launching it.
While the constraints on professional journalists have been discussed in detail in the various venues where the coverage of the war is itself the topic (trade publications focused on journalism, for example), there has been little or no mention of those constraints built into the actual reporting so that the mass audience may be only vaguely aware of them, if at all. If it is simply impossible to report without using this footage, it would seem that given how this practice seems to clash with journalistic norms and practices in other areas, the very least that is required is stringent requirements to assure transparency. Rather than making the assumption that their audiences must know what the
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