After Zoriah Miller was "disembedded" from his Marine unit in Iraq, following the publication of graphic photos of a suicide bombing, the New York Times questions "what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war."

Miller, in fact, was surprised by the attention the image received, noting that his were not photographs of exceptional circumstances. They were, "photographs of something that happens every day all across the country." Miller continued, "the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working."
 
"If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists -- too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts -- the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme," notes NYT. "After five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers."

By a recent count, just six Western photographers are covering the war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.

When the War in Iraq reached its fifth anniversary in March - it didn't make the front page in many American papers. The decreased coverage, of course, is in response to a range of issues - a public weary of the war, costs of maintaining foreign bureaus for economically ailing papers, journalists' safety - but increasingly, embed restrictions - or retribution even against photographs abiding by the rules - is an issue.

According to NYT, "New embed rules were adopted in the spring of 2007 that required written permission from wounded soldiers before their image could be used, a near impossibility in the case of badly wounded soldiers... While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers... in practice, photographers say, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared. In four out of five cases that The New York Times was able to document, the photographer was immediately kicked out of his or her embed following publication of such photos."

Further, in many cases, the military has simply restricted access to combat. When Franco Pagetti tried to cover heavy figting in Baghdad's Sadr City in April 2008, "The commander there refused to let me in... He said it was unsafe. I know it's unsafe, there's a war going on. It was unsafe when I got to Iraq in 2003, but the military did not stop us from working. Now, they are stopping us from working."

Sources: Editor & Publisher, The New York Times