Some of the online media folks are up in arms about the “hot mic” recording of President Obama making remarks about budget negotiations with GOP leaders.

CBS apparently has the full recordings, but has only released a 2-minute, 47-second video of Obama’s comments.

The amount of hot mic comments made by the president are unknown, but some folks are asking for the full recordings, citing an interest in the full comments as “news we deserve to hear.”

And there lies the conundrum: Should the entirety of these recordings be released to the public?

If the president became overly candid with some of his peers in what he believed to be private, those comments are not something the general public needs to hear; it isn’t news so much as a gossip.

But then, if the president made comments that are significant enough to be actual news — a subjective and controversial definition to reach in any situation — CBS should want to release those comments so the public could better understand the man leading this country.

The question is now whether CBS is correct in regard to not releasing the recordings in their entirety. Mark Knoller, White House correspondent for CBS, tweeted to John Romano, publisher of the blog “Yes, But, However!,” in response to why the entire audio recordings haven’t been released that, “My editors decided against it.”

This decision by CBS could be an attempt to cover up comments by Obama, or it could be CBS simply decided the majority of the recordings weren’t newsworthy, and as such decided to not release them as they were private comments.

CBS is a news source that makes decisions about what to and what not to cover on a daily basis. Just because it happened upon something doesn’t mean it has to be reported on.

If this information has news value, then the recordings should be released. If the information is simply the president talking in what he thought was private, with no real news value, then the recordings do not have to be released. CBS has the information, and as a news source, they can choose what it wants to do with the “story.”

We approach this situation with a tentative trust that CBS is making a respectable news judgment decision to not sensationalize comments that have no real bearing on the world; not simply shielding a candidate who has the network’s support. At the same time, we need to carefully watch this and future incidents from any news source if the content in question does indeed possess legitimate news value.