Obama goes to Dover to salute fallen soldiers

Right after President Obama was elected Defense Secetary Robert Gates lifted the ban on news coverage of soldiers' remains. Last night President Obama went to Dover to salute the fallen soldiers coming back from war. The ban allows family members to decide whether they do or do no want coverage. I think that it is very important for the press to be given the option to report the deaths of soldiers at war and when their remains return home. There is SO much press on the war; the bombings and the operations but for years it seemed as though we were sending young people over there and where did they end up? We would hear about a number of soldiers dying during a mission but as disturbing as this sounds, these reports became redundant and desensitizing to viewers that those numbers and that report was actually a group of human Americans. The reporting was never complete. In order to remain completely truthful reporters should be allowed to cover the tragedies of war even on the American side.

The picture of Obama saluting a soldier in Dover last night brought up controversy over whether it was a just a photo-op. How could someone even think that? As the President of the United States I would think it was his responsibility to show respect for the soldiers that were lost at war and to remind the United States that it is losing some of it's best.

Who is the real fact checker?

Blogs or newspapers...

The Huffington Post posted a story from the Toldeo Blade about Obama's view on the shaky status of many newspapers across the nation. ""I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," the President said,"" the article quoted. Although I am all for preserving the newspaper industry in the United States, I think that I will have to disagree with the president on the trend towards blogs shouting at each other without any real facts. Newspapers do not always have the right facts and in fact, many blogs are now the fact checkers for newspapers. The issue of blogs vs. newspapers is a confusing battle. I am still unsure of how there will be room for both blogs and newspapers in the media world if in the future newspapers are given a non-profit status. 

Blogs allow journalists to express themselves and report without a hovering big brother. In that sense, I think blogs are great for today's media. However, it is hard to weed out the ones that are trustworthy and the ones that really are just nonsense. 

Newspapers are the traditional standard of journalism and because of that they already have the trust of the reader, although this trust can be broken and has been broken in the past by false reporting. Right now, I believe newspapers are constrained to reporting what their publisher and advertisers find important and that is not real journalism. 

What are your thoughts on this issue?