Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates went to extraordinary lengths last week to try to persuade a major news organization not to make public a photo of a 21-year-old Marine rifleman dying in Afghanistan, saying that to do so over the express objections of the family was “unconscionable” and “appalling.”

The Secretary’s appeal, made in a phone call and letter to Tom Curley, president and CEO of the Associated Press, was rejected.

Readers who turned to the Op-Ed page the past few Mondays expecting to find the longstanding feature pairing columnists Arianna Huffington and Ann Coulter found something else in its stead, like this column.

What’s up?, a number have asked. My response is this column. Those who have written directly to Stars and Stripes have received the following from the senior managing editor, Howard Witt:

A New York Times reporter falls into the hands of the Taliban and not a word appears in major news outlets until after his escape seven months later.

An American soldier in Afghanistan falls into the hands of the Taliban, and although the military seeks media restraint while it launches a search, his plight earns barely three days of silence.

A double standard?

Maybe yes, maybe no.

“The press is not the enemy, and to treat it so is self-defeating.”
— Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, to the 2007 graduating class of the United States Naval Academy

You may have read that a Stars and Stripes reporter, Heath Druzin, has been blocked from embedding with a 1st Cavalry unit.

More precisely, he has been barred from returning to cover a unit that he previously accompanied during the joint U.S.-Iraqi military effort to secure Mosul, one of Iraq’s most violent cities.

A handful of readers have written to say that they were taken by surprise — unhappily so — when they recently turned to the weather page and encountered a pared-down version of a favorite feature.

"The weather section in the Middle East edition has recently changed for the worse," Army Capt. Sean Holland wrote from Baghdad. "It’s much smaller and contains a lot less info. The map of the Middle East is way smaller and there’s no descriptive info, just a map with highs and lows. The worst part is the daily highs and lows for the US are no longer listed. I had enjoyed looking up my home town every day and seeing how much cooler it was than Baghdad.

A striking item appeared under "Letters to the Editor" on April 2: a signed, personal apology from a midlevel editor at Stars and Stripes addressed "To the members of the National Guard."

The editor, Patrick Dickson, was seeking to make amends for a journalistic lapse he had been instrumental in a few days earlier as Washington bureau chief.

I found the apology troubling, both in concept and execution.

Somewhere along the way of my career, there was told a tale of an irascible old newspaper reporter renowned for crafting pitch-perfect leads, or opening paragraphs of a news story, that would all too often be followed by the instruction to editors back in the newsroom: "pick up wires here."

As far as the readers would know, the entire story was the fruit of his creative labors. Everyone else — editors, sources, competitors and the wire service reporters who had provided the bulk of the reporting published under his byline — would know it wasn’t.

But he could get away with it with a wink and a nod because that was the culture of journalism of that day. Thankfully, cultures change.

With George W. Bush gone from the White House, "now is the time to renegotiate the rules of engagement between the military and the media," the head of The Associated Press recently declared. "Now is the time to insist that the First Amendment does apply to the battlefield."

The AP executive, CEO Tom Curley, argues that the military has "weaponized information" and that President Barack Obama must rein in the Pentagon. By way of example, Curley cites a recent AP report on a $4.7 billion effort to influence opinion "in favor of U.S. military endeavors," such as the intensifying conflict in Afghanistan.