Neil Munro at National Journal has an important examination of the photojournalism of the Iraq war:

Thanks to digital technology, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most photographed in history. Photographers with digital cameras have provided, almost instantaneously, an enormous flood of accurate, dramatic, and even shocking images to people around the world. But the daily downloads of news photos include some that are staged, fake, or so lacking in context as to be meaningless, despite the Western media’s best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional. […]
For photo editors, new pressures to get it right are coming from Internet bloggers who collect and post critical comments from ordinary citizens and also from niche experts who may have intimate knowledge of the local culture, the U.S. military, or the particular news event in question, Elbert said. “We in the mainstream media have always decided what [images] we want to push out, but now people are disagreeing and questioning accuracy,” he said. “This is really confounding the mainstream media.”

That’s a good thing. So are the unfiltered news sources like Michael Yon Online, which today introduces a new feature called Frontline Forum where soldiers can share their pictures and stories directly.