For quite some time now, the so-called digerati have been trash talking the “old media” by highlighting the threat of people-powered, or distributed news production. You might call this form of news “power to the people with video cameras.” For the most part however, the impact of this newfound capacity to not only produce, but also widely distribute alternative news and information has been considered an insignificant pipe dream, a red herring. The work of overzealous political bloggers, or radical newsies who are doped up on insence.

The New York Times today picked up on the rather steady flow of videos, posted to sites such as YouTube, capturing attacks against US troops. These are the sorts of footage most likely to take the distirbuted news topic to main street. You have the type of footage most likely to be consored by the US government available on a set of internet sites to which US citizens have access.

So now the debate will turn past whether distributed news production will be a problem, to the ethics of censoring this footage- whether that censoring is done by the individual, the media, or the government.