Study Finds Mixed Success For "Embed" Reporting

by Miren Gutierrez

Now, the Iraq war has added a new phrase to the lexicon of war-time journalism and to the elusive struggle between factual reporting and subtle cheerleading: "embedded journalists," those reporters assigned to military units, to live, march and endure hardship with them, reporting from the front-lines hampered only by some security restrictions.

To be sure, there is nothing new about journalists travelling with troops and reporting, as it were, from the foxhole. Ernie Pyle reported the Second World War from the perspective of the average fighting soldier, and his column appeared in more than 300 weekly and 400 daily newspapers and was avidly read both at home and in the trenches. An individualist in the classical American tradition, he would most probably have been offended had he been called an "embedded" reporter, with its cog-in-the-machine, corporate connotations.

Yet, in this war, you could be either "embedded" or "unilateral," the latter a very uncomfortable, risky proposition, with a very limited possibility of being in the right place at the right time. The "embeds" could, however, ride into action atop an Abrams tank, videophone at hand.

But at what cost the ride?

Almost 600 journalists -- 20 percent of them foreign -- have been "embedded" with U.S. and British troops in the campaign against Saddam Hussein. They exceed, by far, the number of reporters covering the last conflict in Afghanistan.

Yet U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has suggested that their audience was watching only "slices" of the war.

Judging from an analysis of "embedded" television reports in three of the first six days of the war, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, he is right.

"The embedded coverage," the research found, "is largely anecdotal. It is both exciting and dull, combat focused, and mostly live and unedited. Much of it lacks context but it is usually rich in detail. It has all the virtues and vices of reporting only what you can see."

Talk about the fog of war.

"The embeds can rightfully claim their place in war journalism history even as they are writing it," said 'The Kansas City Star'. "They've proved adept at conveying both the boredom of war (you're eating how many times a day?) and the danger (Ted Koppel calmly describing his 3rd Infantry unit as it charges through a perilous gap west of Karbala)."

In the frenzy to "feed the idiot box," to use an expression from Spike Lee's movie 'Bambozzled', mistakes also happened.

One of the most cited blunders was Fox News correspondent Doug Luzader's report of an infiltration of "terrorists" in Kuwait's Camp Pennsylvania, after a grenade attack Mar. 22. It turned out that a lone U.S. soldier was charged in the incident; two of his fellow soldiers were killed.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism study concludes, also, that the public seemed "better served by having the embedding system than they were from more limited press pools during the Gulf War of 1991 or only halting access to events in Afghanistan."

U.S. television went heavy on the symbols of patriotism. Stars and Stripes fluttered in on-screen logos, while poignant war images filled lapses between live reporting and advertising breaks.

As the war began, U.S. television assumed that Iraqis would offer no resistance. It generally reflected the pro-war sentiments of the government; rarely showed Iraqi civilian casualties, unless aided by U.S. soldiers; endlessly showcased U.S. weapons technology and resorted to expressions like "the good guys" to refer to U.S. troops.

By editing the reality for patriotic reasons, U.S. TV might have achieved exactly the opposite.

As Bill Kovach, founding director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, said in a prophetic speech during the annual meeting of the Organization of News Ombudsmen in 2002, "a journalist is never more true to democracy, is never more engaged as a citizen, is never more patriotic, than when aggressively doing the job of independently verifying the news of the day."

Now, Kovach says: "I do believe American journalists are failing the public."

"This kaleidoscopic view of the war is made more confusing by lack of any real reporting on the larger picture by independent journalists," he adds. "Instead almost all efforts to pull the pieces together and show a larger picture is being done by military experts who tend, even when they are wrong, to tell a military story."

According to Kovach, the untold story is the unintended consequence of this embedded-with-the troops reporting.

"By making the story more personal, and yet showing little of the horror of war, it heightened the patriotic 'my country right or wrong' fever in the United States, and news organizations concerned with mass circulation audiences were reluctant to do in-depth critical reporting of the political and policy decisions involved in the process," he says. "Many -- Fox News leading the way -- resorted to jingoistic, flag waving rhetoric that at times could be described as propaganda."

Again, nothing new here. First World War British journalist Philip Gibbs answered critics of his propaganda-driven war reporting by contending that, "Some of us wrote the truth from the first to the last -- apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses and criticism of the facts."

But even critics of the system admit that many "embeds" did their job well. "As you know, a number of them paid the ultimate price in doing so," says Kovach. "The shortcomings were not the result of embedding but lay outside that area of reporting."

Up to now, at least 11 journalists have died covering the war. Julio A. Parrado, Christian Liebig, Michael Kelly, and David Bloom were killed while accompanying coalition forces.

In any case, embedded reports were not the only ones the public had access to. At least 100 independent journalists were in Baghdad when the U.S. tanks roamed and roared through the streets of the Iraqi capital.

Their job was not easy.

The Pentagon expelled 'Christian Science Monitor' reporter Phil Smucker from Iraq on grounds that he revealed sensitive military information in broadcast interviews.

Later, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in New York, complained formally that U.S. forces interfered with and mistreated four non-embedded journalists. They were accused of spying and detained incommunicado without food for more that 48 hours.

But the most serious incident was the U.S. strikes, intentional according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), against a hotel full of independent journalists and the office of the Al-Jazeera satellite network in Baghdad.

Cameramen Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Josˇ Couso of Spain's Telecinco, were killed in the first attack on the Palestine Hotel. U.S. officials have stated that their troops were responding to sniper fire from the roof of the hotel. Eyewitnesses said they heard no gunfire coming from the building.

Embedded CNN journalist Walter Rodgers referred thus to the incident: "It's called self-defense," he said, reporting from the mechanised U.S. cavalry unit he rode with.

Al-Jazeera reporter Taraq Ayyoub was killed in the second offensive and cameraman Zouhair al-Iraqi was injured. Moments later another explosion damaged the nearby office of Abu Dhabi TV. Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul was also targeted by U.S.-forces in November 2001.

The CPJ also suspects the attacks were deliberate.

In a letter of protest addressed to Rumsfeld, CPJ Acting Director Joel Simon says, "The evidence suggests that the response of the U.S. forces was disproportionate and therefore violated international humanitarian law."

So, what's next for U.S. journalism after Iraq?

"For the short term, it will be a press that is less likely to boldly cover issues that can be seen as critical of authority -- issues like the disappearance of civil liberties in the name of national security, critical world opinion, unilaterialism in American foreign policy, the decline of diplomacy and the rise of military solutions to diplomatic problems, etc.," says Kovach.

"Because of the stunning success of the military action and the public's infatuation with the images of victory," he concludes, "this is the future."