Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq.

AuthorSmith, Kevin A.
PositionBook Review

EMBEDDED: THE MEDIA AT WAR IN IRAQ. By Bill Katovsky (1) and Timothy Carlson. (2) Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press. 2003. Pp. xix, 422. $23.95.

Due largely to the first widespread availability of the telegraph, through which breaking stories could be transmitted to the presses in moments, the debut of the American war correspondent occurred during the Civil War. (3) From their beginning, American war correspondents have frequently "embedded" with the troops on whom they reported. (4) General Grant, for example, allowed his favorite New York Herald reporter to travel with his entourage, and even used him as a personal messenger. (5)

Reporters proved an important component of the war effort for both the North and the South. Papers on both sides proved willing providers of propaganda to rally citizen support. (6) Southern papers exaggerated Northern casualties, refused to acknowledge Confederate defeats, and characterized Union troops as drunken foreigners. (7) Northern papers ignored Union difficulties in drafting troops and racism in the Union Army, and downplayed Union defeats. (8)

But from the beginning, the war correspondents' value to both society and the military has been questioned. Civil War-era dispatches were frequently inaccurate, biased, and sensationalist, "a series of wild ravings about the roaring of the guns and the whizzing of the shells and the superhuman valour of the men." (9) Just as today, not every officer appreciated journalists' efforts. General Sherman wrote, "Now to every army and almost every general a newspaper reporter goes along ... inciting jealousy and discontent, and doing infinite mischief." (10) The desire to suppress that mischief produced early, haphazard efforts to censor dispatches harmful to the military effort. (11) Nevertheless, their reports proved profitable to newspapers, multiplying circulation when a large battle was featured. (12)

The Civil War established the framework that would characterize the media-military relationship to the present day. The two institutions have always shared a tense but symbiotic relationship. During times of war, the military depends on the media to defuse enemy propaganda, to serve as an information conduit to the people, and to rally domestic support. (13) A war that lasts more than a few days requires the consent of the public, and that consent is not forthcoming without at least some favorable information on the war's progress. (14) Consequently, the military has sought to mold that coverage to serve its own ends, frequently relying on prepublication review of reporters' stories and restricting their access to the battlefield and politically damaging information.

The stationing of over five-hundred journalists within military units during Operation Iraqi Freedom represents the most recent round in this relationship and the largest expansion of the century-old practice of embedding. (15) Selected reporters lived, traveled, and slept with the units to which they were assigned for weeks or months at a time. They ate the same military rations, faced the same enemy fire, and rode in the same Humvees as the troops on whom they reported. Some were seasoned battlefield reporters, some former soldiers themselves, and still others as green as many of the troops they were covering.

The recent war in Iraq provided fodder for many a soldier or journalist's post-war memoir, most of which were hastily produced to reach the market before the public's attention turned elsewhere. Some, such as former-marines-turned-embeds Ray Smith and Bing West's The March Up (16) documented the fighting and strategy of the war; others, such as Todd Purdum's A Time of Our Choosing (17) framed the war in its larger political context: still others, such as Anne Garrels's Naked in Baghdad (18) painted a more intimate picture of the fear and uncertainty of reporting from inside a city under attack; but Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, through its sheer breadth of interviews, has established itself as the definitive account, not of the fighting, but the coverage of the fighting.

Embedded is the story of several dozen journalists who secured slots within military units, as well as some, whom the Pentagon dubbed unilaterals, who chose to operate independently of the military's embed program. Told in the form of short interviews, Embedded provides an oral history of covering "the most covered war in history" (pp. xi, 419). The interviewees are pro- and anti-war; pro-and anti-embedding; American, European, and Middle-Eastern; men and women; embed and unilateral. They are photographers, radio correspondents, television talking heads (ranging from Al-Jazeera to Fox News), authors of magazine features, and ordinary newspaper reporters. This variety of perspectives makes Embedded a surprisingly useful lens through which to view the media and military's new, hand-in-glove relationship.

This Notice relies on the stories in Embedded to argue that the embed program was a successful accommodation of the needs of the military, the media, and tile public. Whereas past military regulation of war correspondents was plagued by practices that were only questionably in compliance with the First Amendment, embedding created unprecedented opportunities for battlefield reporting free from censorship. Parts I and II provide the historic and legal background that ultimately led to the embedding program. Part I traces the gradual decline in media-military relations during the latter half of the twentieth century. It is this history of progressively increasing mutual mistrust that made the embedding process such a surprising and interesting experiment. Part II discusses past First Amendment challenges to military efforts to control media coverage of war and the obstacles those plaintiffs faced in achieving judicial review of their claims. Those challenges centered largely on access limitations and prepublication security review of news stories.

Part III relies on the stories in Embedded to argue that embedding made great strides towards resolving the public's need to know with the militaries need to control information during wartime. Section A contends thai the media were able to gather frontline news stories without censorship, and the military received comparatively favorable coverage while maintaining mission security. Section B cautions, however, that embedding did take its toll on reporters by calling into question their objectivity and their ability to provide a global perspective of the War, and by potentially compromising their First Amendment protections. Section C argues that relaxing restraints on unilateral reporting served as an essential component of embedding's success. Unilaterals reported on aspects of the War outside of the scope of the embed program, and those stories were presumptively more objective, providing a needed counterpoint to embed reports.

  1. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE LATE-TWENTIETH CENTURY MILITARY-MEDIA RELATIONSHIP

    Although war correspondents have been commonplace since the Civil War, the Vietnam War marked the birth of the modern military-media relationship. It featured both the advent of televised combat and a monumental shift in military-press interaction. (19) In the early years of the Vietnam War, the media and the military shared a relationship of unprecedented openness. (20) Access to the battlefield was remarkably unrestricted, with over seven-hundred correspondents roaming the countryside at any given lime, sometimes with U.S. troops, and sometimes hiring their own transportation, translators, and guides. (21) Unlike in previous wars, the military imposed no formal security review or censorship. (22) The United States Mission in Saigon merely issued guidelines that requested that reporters not release information concerning U.S. casualty figures, troop movements, and other battle information until it was clear that the Viet Cong had access to it. (23) The guidelines were largely complied with voluntarily, with only a very few reporters having their accreditation revoked for violations. (24)

    During previous conflicts, the press acted as a military booster. loyal to the armed forces and supportive of its aims. (25) During the initial stages of Vietnam, most reporters backed the administration, even if they were somewhat critical of its methods. (26) When the war began to turn sour, however, so did the military/press relationship. (27) After the 1968 Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite declared the war unwinnable. The Pentagon began blaming the press for its impending defeat, and the press, in turn, accused the Pentagon of lying about the war. (28) Phillip Knightley recounts in his history of war correspondents:

    In Vietnam. the United States military had accepted war correspondents, called on all ranks to give them full co-operation and assistance, fed them on a reimbursable basis, briefed them. armed them when necessary. defended them, drank with them, and, in general, treated them like members of the team. The military was not happy with what it got in return. (29) Eventually, "[o]fficials ... grew convinced that the reporters were on 'the other side' and blamed the press for souring the American public on the war effort." (30) The idea that anti-war reporters exploited the Pentagon's generous access to publish unfavorable stories that contributed to defeat became conventional wisdom and paved the way for media restrictions on combat coverage during the remainder of the century. (31)

    The policy of unrestricted press access was drastically curtailed in preparation for America's next conflict, Grenada, in which the military adopted a system of press pools to manage battlefield reporting. A press pool is a collection of reporters from various news outlets granted special access by the military. In exchange, the work product of any pool member becomes the property of any accredited organization covering the war. (32) The press pool system was...

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