It's something they teach in journalism schools across the nation, but leave ultimately leave up to the individual's conscience: How far should you go in the pursuit of a story?

It's an issue that more commonly crops up when you're dealing with the legal system here in the United States. Case in point: the two San Francisco Chronicle reporters who received secret grand jury documents in the Barry Bonds steroid case. Those two reporters now face jail time. However, when those two reporters first received those documents -- documents they knew they were being handed illegally -- that they made decision that they knew could eventually result in spending time behind bars. Yet in pursuit of the truth and that story (and the book royalties), they judged that the punishment would be worth the crime.

In the grand scheme of things, the Barry Bonds steroid issue is small potatoes. What's much bigger potatoes is how far the American press has gone in its attempts to cover the terrorists in Iraq.

Last week, the Associated Press revealed that one of its freelance photographers has been held by the U.S. military in Iraq for the past five months -- and demanded he be charged or released. What the AP buried in the 32nd paragraph of his story was that the photographer, Bilal Hussein, had been captured in an apartment with two other terrorists filled with bombmaking equipment.

It's readily apparent to any sane reader that the Associated Press has been paying a terrorist propagandist. That's a charge they certainly deny, but it's hard to argue that seriously when Hussein's photographs are sometimes the equivalent of terrorist check-passing snapshots. (One of the first lessons you learn as a small time newspaper photographer is that you avoid at all costs the cliched photos where one person hands another person an oversized check. They're boring, staged and frankly should never appear in a newspaper.)

If it wasn't clear before, then it should be now: the American media is more media and less American. For most Americans, they're an American first and whatever their job is a distant second or third. The elite media and journalism schools are turning out a bunch of journalists who are amoral at best.

Jules Crittenden at the Boston Herald says it best:

The Associated Press, the reliable just-the-facts news agency you and I once knew, no longer exists. Amoral propagandists have taken over.

It is not only in the disturbing matter of Bilal Hussein, AP photograher and al-Qaeda associate, being held without charge in U.S. custody in Iraq that this is evident. But also in the departure from balanced, nonpartisan coverage that has always been the AP’s promise to us, its customers.

The AP was, in fact, a pioneer in balanced coverage. The concept was born with the AP in 1848 and tempered in the Civil War. The AP served newspapers of different stripes and had to keep politics out of it.

But for any news organization going into war, it’s hard not to have a side. In 1876, AP scribe Mark Kellogg was killed with Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. “I go with Custer and will be at the death,” he reported. Guess which side he was on. In 1941, the AP had to shut its Berlin bureau when its reporters were arrested. In 1945, AP correspondent Joe Morton was executed by the SS. AP correspondents were imprisoned by communists in North Korea, Romania and Czechoslovakia. The AP’s Terry Anderson was held captive by Islamic extremists in Beirut for six years. It is a brave and illustrious history.

The AP has had one or two exemplary war correspondents in Iraq. But this strange war has changed so many things. In late 2004, as the U.S. military was moving to rid Fallujah of the terrorists who controlled it, the AP wanted some eyes inside the city. It hired Bilal Hussein. He gave the AP photos of insurgents setting up ambushes and firing at Americans. He gave them photos of terrorists posing with their freshly slaughtered victims. His pictures helped the AP win a Pulitzer Prize.

A blogger named Darleen at www.darleenclick.com said it very well in December of 2004:

"I have trouble with how cozy this AP photographer is with the terrorists. I realize he’s a Hussein from Fallujah, so his own personal feelings and associations may be on display here, but did The Associated Press . . . employ Nazis to get photos showing attacks on the Allies and the execution of Jews?”

Read the whole thing.