Jeez, that sounds pompous. But it’s as descriptive as I could be without knocking the horizontal off balance.
So anyway. I like the idea of embedded reporters, at least in theory. There’s a contact right there, on scene, so we can get footage firsthand instead of reports from someone who has to scrounge around for info. But some people are suspicious that this is “managed news”: i.e., the military has control over these people and the ability to suppress information (apart from the stuff that has to be suppressed for security reasons).
I like the idea, since it implies that the military has nothing to hide. What say y’all?
It doesn’t really imply the military has nothing to hide. The military has full control over which units to use in which engagements under which circumstances, and the journalists are not free in their movements, e.g. when part of the unit they are attached to have discovered something, they may be denied access there because it might not be safe.
It’s really little more than trying to produce heroes.
I guess my first question would be, why; why is the military content to have 900 reporters within its machine ?
Whatever the answer is, I suspect it ain’t because they want the public to be better informed, or that they want the reporters to have freer access.
Fwiw, *I suspect *smoke and mirrors; the appearance of more and better information and greater ‘freedom’ in coverage when, in actuality, what you get is reassuring tax dollar firework displays and controlled visuals and reportage. I could be wrong …. perhaps too early to say …
I don’t know the answer to this; have any of the 900 embedded reporters come up with good old-fashioned, not planted, journalistic stories yet because all I can recall at this point is the two false alarm ‘WOMD’ non-stories ?
I think that one reason was that they expected much more footage of happy Iraqi’s dancing in the streets, crying tears of grattitude to their ‘liberators’.
Instead we got exactly 1 Iraqi dancing(on request it appears) and 1 iraqi beating a poster of Saddam, who then turns around to the camera with a look like ‘Am I doing it right this way, sir?’
To those who are skeptical – what would you suggest as an alternative? If reporters were forbidden to be present, there would be all KINDS of accusations of coverups and atrocities. If journalists were just wandering around on their own, you know they would be in great danger and might even unintentionally give information to the Iraqis that we don’t want them to have. IMHO the troops on the front lines don’t really have time for “smoke and mirrors” because they have a few other things to do.
Despite all the bluster about how ‘embedded’ reporting will bring us closer to the real war, IMO it’s so far had little or no influence on the sort of information presented to TV viewers. I think it may be more of a success in print journalism, which allows more freedom for description and detail than image-based reporting.
For TV, however, embedding has actually turned out to be as untrustworthy as so-called ‘reality’ TV, providing a judiciously-edited simulation of action while actually providing little more hard information than if the Pentagon was spooning out driblets of data at a press conference. I don’t really blame this on the DoD but more on the nets themselves. Reporters justifiably must be cautious about releasing location and tactical info, but the real problem is that nearly all the images presented on the US-based nets have clearly been sanitized so as not to upset viewers.
Commercial networks, unsurprisingly, are going to avoid running images that cause people to turn away in horror, because horrified and disgusted viewers are unlikely to stick around for the ads. I find it ludicrous, however, that having viewed more than 20 hours of war-related TV reporting over the past 8 days, I have yet to see any of the American networks air more than a few seconds of images of dead or injured bodies, civilian or military, from either side. Yet the creation of dead and injured people is one of the most important by-products of war; if we claim to be honestly reporting news, should we not be showing these things?
Obviously, the majority of the US audience doesn’t really want to know about these things, or there would be more complaint to the networks. All we really want is an abstract image of war that tells us what we most want to believe: that we are doing what we must, that we are facing a fearsome challenge with courage and resolve, that progress is being made, and that our fantastic weapons will magically smite the evil while passing over the innocent.
Jeepers, man, all the yelling I did at Chumpsky when he was around here, and I come off sounding just like him. Sheesh.
A few notes on ‘embedded reporting’ I grabbed from a report on the reporting this morning. They took several of the reports and analyzed them a bit more closely.
Strip #1: A soldier is about to destroy a tank by throwing a hand grenade into it from the top. Before he does so, however, he establishes eye contact with the camera, making sure he’s being filmed. He is not being filmed while doing his job, he’s doing a job to be filmed.
Strip #2: A soldier aims with his rifle while the camera man stands to his right (cover can only be seen to the left, even in a later sweep), i.e. in the open. The soldier pulls the trigger, but it jams. He lowers the gun, fiddles with it, raises it, fires. No shots fired at them in the meantime, and the only thing that moves in the direction of the shot is a man on his bike, travelling away from the two, well to the right of the line of fire.
Strip #3: Again, an armored vehicle is to be destroyed. We know how that goes, right? Just dump a hand grenade into it… Nope. Not this time. This time, we open a hatch at the back and aim at it with an anti tank gun.
Conclusion of a retired lieutenant colonel watching the strips: It’s a TV show. A big ballyhoo for the cameras, a theatre with the Coalition troops as protagonists.
I think the military is taking a big risk here – what if things go disastrously wrong for a unit and that gets reported on. It will be footage just too dramatic to ignore, and it’ll be all over the place.
I like the embedded reporters. I like the fact that the reporters are right there with the troops, sharing in the risks of war to an extent. I am sure the journalists will wind up with an attitude of respect and admiration for the troops they are with, and I suspect the troops will respect the journalists more, for being willing to lay it on the line to get the story.
I don’t think this will result in more powder-puff journalism. I think the respect and admiration the journalists feel for the soldiers will make them much more likely to challenge stupid decisions from On High that put the troops at risk unnecessarily. That happened in WWII as well … a lot of tough journalists came out of that war. I suspect that a lot of tough journalists will come out of this one.
The problem with your argument is that it is dependent on premises that may or may not be true.
That things go disastrously wrong for a unit and that goes on the air requires two things: A unit with an embedded reporter goes somewhere were something goes terribly wrong AND he has to be live on the air at the time. We already had several incidents were the first was avoided by keeping part of a unit outside the hot zone of an area and telling the reporter ‘what was happening’ inside. If the second isn’t the case, the reel either never gets to be seen by an audience or can be screened by the military before it is.