Interviewing David Leeson

David Leeson is a senior staff photojournalist for The Dallas Morning News. He, along with colleague Cheryl Diaz Meyers, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography for covering the 2003 war with Iraq.

David Leeson has a long career full with outstanding assignments. Here's part of his assignments (Via The Dallas Morning News):

His assignments have included coverage of the FDN "Freedom Fighters" in their war against the former Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Other Central and South American assignments have included: El Salvador presidential elections (1984 and 88), civil unrest in Panama (1988) Peru (1989) and coverage of Colombia's drug wars (1989).
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In 1986 he lived on the streets of Dallas with the homeless for two months. The photos, published in a 24-page special section by The Dallas Morning News, won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Outstanding Coverage of the Problems of the Disadvantaged.

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Today, he's our guest. I thank him for giving us the chance to understand the work and life of combat photojournalists.

Fay: You were embedded with a 3rd Infantry unit during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Please explain how embedded journalists work around the troops. How flexible is such a task? Were you free to report the good and bad acts unfolding during your Iraq assignment?

David: The only restrictions were a list of ground rules all journalists were asked to read and sign. They were mostly things that could be described as a code of ethics and sensibility. For instance, one rule required withholding images of U. S. deaths for a couple of days until notification of next of kin. That's something I would probably do anyway simple because it's a matter of high ethics. I wouldn't want a family member learning of their loved ones death on the front page of their newspaper.

Another rule among the list could be called "common sense." It forbade any mention of exact locations of bases or discussions/reporting of future operations. In other words, breaking this rule could place your own life at risk since we lived and traveled among the troops, not to mention the lives of the soldiers.

But that's the whole of it. The soldiers and commanders treated me as a member of the unit, though I reminded them often of my role as a journalist. I explained that I was not there to make them look good but neither was I there to make them look bad. I was merely an observer of unfolding events.

The commander gave me complete freedom to function as a photojournalist. I was never censored or asked to submit photos or notes for military review. Nor were my satellite phone conversations limited or monitored. I realized in the midst of this that I would have far less freedoms on the streets of virtually any city in the United States.

However, being an embedded journalist means that you are with the soldiers, all the time. There is no allowance to leave the unit to do a story and then return at a later date.

Fayrouz in Beaumont

Make sure you read it all.

Update: I think these are the images in question.

I hope I don't get in trouble for posting this, and that these are in fact the pictures in the controversy mentioned in the story.