of ABSTRACT
Title Document:
DEGREES OF ACCESS: FACTORS PREVENTING WIDE-SCOPE COVERAGE OF THE IRAQ WAR BY EMBEDDED REPORTERSFROM SHOCK AND AWE TO MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (MARCH 21 - MAY 1, 2003) Submitted by: Lindsay Reed Walton Candidate, Master of Arts in Journalism
Directed By:
Linda Steiner, Ph.D. Professor, Phillip Merrill College of Journalism
Reporters embedded with U.S. military units during the first two months of the Iraq War (2003-) dealt with a number of impediments the combination of which was previously unseen in the history of war reporting. These included physical proximity, bonding, and shared peril with American soldiers, informal self-censorship based on ground rules, and technological capacity for real-time visual transmission of reportage. These and other factors such as travel restrictions and post-9/11 editorial bias prevented embeds from seeing anything but a narrow slice of the war.
DEGREES OF ACCESS: FACTORS PREVENTING WIDE-SCOPE COVERAGE OF THE IRAQ WAR BY EMBEDDED REPORTERSFROM SHOCK AND AWE TO MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (MARCH 21 - MAY 1, 2003)
By
Lindsay Reed Walton
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Journalism 2008
Advisory Committee: Professor Linda Steiner, Chair Professor Haynes Johnson Professor Rafael Lorente
Copyright by Lindsay Reed Walton 2008
Dedication
I would like to dedicate this project to Jonathan Z. Seder, without whose unending support its completion would not have been possible. And to Barbara Melnyk, who forged the reporter in the fire.
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Table of Contents
Dedication ..................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents......................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2: Traditional and Historical Blocks to Access............................................. 17 Vietnam through Gulf War I: Lessons.................................................................... 17 Moving Toward a New Policy................................................................................ 27 Embedding .............................................................................................................. 31 Chapter 3: New Restrictions, New Considerations..................................................... 40 Luck of the Draw .................................................................................................... 40 Practical Limitations ............................................................................................... 56 Chapter 4: Obstacles to Objectivity ............................................................................ 68 Editorial Inconsistency, Home-Front Bias, and the 9/11 Effect.......................... 74 Print Embeds....................................................................................................... 75 The 9/11 Effect................................................................................................ 77 Broadcast Embeds............................................................................................... 81 Chapter 5: Conclusion................................................................................................ 87 Appendices.................................................................................................................. 90 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 106
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Chapter 1: Introduction
Top military brass liked the Defense Departments embedding program. It was a way in which to channel journalistic eagerness to be on the front lines, witnessing the first draft of history, into the many-valved organ of the armed forces. Reporters would eat, sleep, and interact withand more likely than not befriendthe soldiers in their units. This would lead tothe architects of embedding hopeda positive aggregate picture of military operations during the Iraq War. The U.S. Department of Defensespecifically Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeldand President George W. Bush reasoned that placing troops within military units offered the greatest possibility for countering misleading press reports or negative propaganda from Middle Eastern news sources.1 Proximity to the battlefield, in addition to technology that made real-time event coverage possible, supporters argued, allowed the public a more intimate look into the confusion, horror, bravery, and sacrifice of war than ever before.2 As Terence Smith wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review, the combination of cutting-edge broadcast technology
Jeffrey C. Bliss. Iraq: The Press Goes to War. Hoover Digest. No. 3. (2003) http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3057436.html. It was President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who thought that embedding reporters with military units would help win the propaganda war at a time when the United States seemed to be losing it in the Arab world. If military leaders let reporters hear and see what they were doing, the resulting stories would do the administration more good than harm in the battle to win over Muslims to the American cause: This was a big part of the rationale behind the mandate to open it up. 2 Jim Garamone. American Forces Press Service. (Air University, Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base) Mar. 26, 2003. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dod/embedded.htm. ASDPA Victoria Torie Clarke: First reports of the process have been positive. So far, the embedding seems to have gone very well,.Americans and people around the world are seeing firsthand the wonderful dedication and discipline of the coalition forces.
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and physical closeness would lend itself to a kind of intimate, immediate, absorbing, almost addictive coverage, the likes of which we have not seen before.3 Defense Department officials hopes were fulfilledthe strategy worked. Like an Impressionist painting, the flood of intense, personal, affecting, and predominantly objective reports displayed at least a recognizable pattern of the wars progression on both strategic and human fronts.4 Journalists also largely describe the program as a success. About 80 percent of 159 Iraq war reporters surveyed between January and March 2004 said embedded journalists were successful in their reporting of the war. Only 17.5 percent of reporters polled by Fahmy and Johnson said that war coverage by embeds was biased; 21.4 percent felt that reports from embeds were sensationalized.5 This is not to say that journalists were entirely uncritical of the program, though. Ninety percent of reporters surveyed said that while embedded reporters avoided bias and sensationalism, the reports they produced from the field provided only a narrow slice of the conflict.6 In 2003 embedded reporter George C. Wilson of the National Journal said on PBSs NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that embedded reporters were somewhat like the second dog on the dogsled teamyou saw an
The Real-Time War: Defining news in the Middle East. Columbia Journalism Review. May/June 2003. http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2003/3/standard-smith.asp. 4 See e.g.: Sean Aday, Steven Livingston, and Maeve Hebert. Embedding the Truth: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Objectivity and Television Coverage of the Iraq War. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics. Vol.10, no.3. (2005) [E]mbedded reporters had among the highest percentage of neutral [in tone] storiesof any type of reporter. 5 Shahira Fahmy and Thomas Johnson, How We Performed: Embedded Journalists Attitudes & Perceptions Toward Covering the Iraq War. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Vol. 82, No. 2. (2005) pp. 301-317. (Table 1.) 6 Ibid.
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awful lot of the dog in front of you and a little bit to the left and the right.7 This dogsled effect resulted from the way the embedding program was structured. Embeds were given greater free rein within the operations of their assigned units than had been the case since the conflicts following the Vietnam war8, but were constrained for the sake of safety and other considerations to mirroring the motion of that unit, curtailing reportorial freedom by situational lack of access.9 Access, for the purposes of this paper, will be defined as the combination of all the elements to which a reporter must be exposed in order to cover a story well, including depth, opposing points of view, observable firsthand descriptions of events, and the means by which to relay information to consumers of news. The effects of editorial decisions and self-censorship will also be explored. Access to events in a war zone, access to those affected, access to the technological means to give the raw story material to their editors (filing), and relative freedom from unreasonable censorship are part of the concept of access in this case. Walter Lippmann wrote that the most obvious place to find news is where peoples affairs touch public authority.10 By that definition, a war equals almost constant newsworthiness. A
The Medias War. (Transcript). The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. PBS. Apr. 21, 2003. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june03/embed_4-21.html. 8 See e.g.: Chip Reid. Recalling life as an embedded reporter. NBC News. Mar. 14, 2004. After all, the argument went, we depended on the Marines for access and for our own safety. Not to mention the fact that reporters became friends with and in many cases (definitely in my case), admired the troops they were covering. The commanding officer of my battalion gave us virtually unlimited access, even on sensitive stories. He said his orders were to let us report on the good, the bad and the ugly. And that's what we did. Also: Baker, Peter. Inside View. American Journalism Review. May 2003. http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=2993. 9 Judith Sylvester and Suzanne Huffman. Reporting from the Front. Lanham (Md.): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. p. 123. There were reporters I knew who were upset because they couldnt get transportation to go talk to other people about what was happening. The commanding officers wanted us to let them know where we were, if we left the unit. It just didnt seem that it was worth it to move about. 10 Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922. p. 341.
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combat zone is hypersaturated with intersections between peoples affairs and public authority, sometimes in the bluntest and most grisly manner possible. The concept of access for the individual embedded reporter turned out to determine quality and breadth of coverage during offensive operations before the fall of Baghdad. Reporting in the Iraq Warmuch like World War IIinvolved journalists reconciling abstract patriotic outrage at an attack on U.S. soil with the imperative to report on the war at hand11, and balancing emotional attachment to the soldiers that reporters covered with the need to report military actions honestly and fairly.12 The degree of access achieved specifically by embedded reporters in this most recent conflict was determined by a number of factors that had not been seen in this particular combination in the history of war reporting. These factors included: 1) close physical proximity, shared danger, and companionship with soldiers; 2) subjective and/or informal censorship, as opposed to formal submission of transmitted text to censors; and 3) the technological capacity for real-time transmission of live visual reportage. Each of these factors on its ownand sometimes in combination with one or two of the othershas been a part of war reporting in the past. The first combat reporters in recorded history were considered part of the armed forces, sharing meals,
Lawrence Nakatsuka. Star-Bulletins only Japanese reporter sent to interview enemy. Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Dec. 4, 1999. As for myself, there was no ambiguity: I was born, raised and educated an American. Period. The Star-Bulletin accepted me as an American without qualms. It had no doubts at all about my loyalty as an AmericanOn that Sabbath morning of Dec. 7, 1941, I was still asleep at home when my phone rang. This is Howard Case. My city editor's voice was taut and tense. Get down here to the office right away! I raced to the city room on Merchant Street downtown. The place was jumping with activity.I wanted to get in on the action. I wanted something to do, anything. 12 Brian Corbin. Voice of common soldier lives on at museum. Evansville (Ill.) Courier & Press. Oct. 28, 2007. He basically was the voice of the common soldier: What he focused on and what he was interested in was what the GIs experienced and their daily lives, said David Weaver, acting manager of the [Ernie Pyle] state historic site. Today, you have embedded reporters out with the troops; well, that was kind of Ernie Pyle's idea. He lived with the troops, he camped with them, he wanted their story, not the official press releases all the time.
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lodging, and travel with the troops: In 424 BCE, Thucydides led the Athenian fleet at Thasos and simultaneously penned an account of his forces defeat at the hands of the Spartans.13 As an army commander as well as correspondent, Thucydides of course was an armed participant in the battle. The post of the modern unarmed professional war correspondent began with William Billy Russell, who covered several wars for the London Times, including the Crimean War in the 1850s and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Russell was not fed or housed by the British armed forces, however; he had to provide his own tent, horse, and rations.14 In America, the notion of journalists traveling along with the troops under military supervision and protection was not a new one. Mark Kellogg, a freelance reporter traveling with Lt. Col. George Custers Seventh Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Little Bighorn was allowed by Custer to follow the regiment against the orders of superior officers, bunking with the troops and sharing meals before the engagement on June 26, 1876. On that day, Kellogg rode a slow mule behind the charging cavalry onto the field of battle, and died along with Custer and his troops.15 Part of the lot of the war reporter who lived with soldiers is also to face the same mortal peril as the soldiers. A World War I correspondent for The New Republic, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, was gravely wounded near Reims, France in 1918 when
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Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Rex Warner, trans. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001. p. 328. They and Eucles, the general from Athens who was there to defend the place, sent to the other general in Thrace, Thucydides, the son of Olorus, the author of this history, who was then at the island of Thasos, a colony of the Parians, about half a days sail from Amphipolis, asking him to come to their relief. 14 William Russell (2004). The Evolution of War Reporting from the Crimea to Iraq. 15 Harold M. Evans. The Combat Correspondent: A look at war reporting from Caesars commentaries to cell phones. Media Studies Journal. Vol. 15, no. 1. (Summer 2001) p. 3.
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an Army Lieutenant near her picked up an unexploded grenade.16 War writer Ernie Pyle, who became famous for roving the front lines during World War II looking for tellable stories, was killed in 1945 on the island of Ie Shima when a machine gunners stray bullet hit his left temple.17 A system of informal censorship based on a set of rules generated by the military and agreed to by war correspondents was likewise not unique to the second war in Iraq. Certainly, the government has both used the press and limited the press since Americas first war, the Revolution of 1775 to 1783. Gen. George Washington and his allies sometimes provided the colonial press with inflated figures for British casualties.18 Washington also complained about wartime journalists detailed reporting. It is much to be wished that our printers were more discreet in many of their publications. We see, almost in every paper, proclamation or accounts transmitted by the enemy of an injurious nature. If some limit or caution could be given them on the subject, it might be of material service.19 Formal censorship of military reporters material in America had its beginnings in the Sedition Act of 1798 under the specter of war with France, and was carried through the Civil War to all U.S. conflicts up to and including operations in Korea. Though war was not actually declared on France in the last decade of the 18th century, the administration of President John Adams signed into law the Sedition Act,
Tad Bartimus. Bullets and Bathrooms. Media Studies Journal. Vol. 15, no. 1. (Summer 2001) p. 9. A stunning report, a blinding flash, and I am precipitated down the bank, hearing, it seems, as I go, the Lieutenants shriek of horror: My arm! My arm has been carried away! The surgeon is bending over my wounds nowI am getting ether in large quantities. Sensation of vibrationof waves beating, and through it voices very clear: Who is she? A journalist. 17 Owen V. Johnson. Ernie Pyle: 60 years after his death. Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times. April 15, 2005. http://journalism.indiana.edu/news/041505pyle/. 18 Blame Grenada! American invasion of tiny Caribbean island changed everything for press. (2001) 19 Philander D. Chase. The Papers of George Washington. Vol. 9. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969. p. 68.
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which made publishing any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United Stateswith intent to defame, or to bring them contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them [the] hatred of the good people of the United States.20 During the American Civil War, both Union and Confederate correspondents were numerous. In the North, large newspapers such as the New York Herald had as many as 60 war reporters in the field.21 The North subjected its correspondents to no formal censorship, leading Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to complain: They publish without stint positive information of movements past [and] prospective, organizations, names of commanders, and accurate information which reaches the enemy with as much regularity as it does our People[N]o matter how rapidly we move, the enemy has advance noticeNever had an enemy a better corps of spies than our army carries along, paid, transported, and fed by the United States.22 For this reason, the Lincoln administration suppressed publishing of certain facts in Union newspapers.23 Meanwhile, the Confederacy used a sort of pool system in which local journalists would cover battles close to their locations.24 In World Wars I and II, offices of censorship were established on the home front to prevent information such as that causing Sherman such grief during the Civil War prospective troop movements, names of operations, etc.from reaching enemy eyes and ears. Few reporters objected to these policies because of a strong nationalistic sentiment thatas Byron Price, director of the U.S. Office of Censorship in 1942,
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Geoffrey Stone. Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004. p. 36. 21 Russell (2004). The Evolution of War Reporting from the Crimea to Iraq. p. 32. 22 Peter S. Prichard. Basic Training. Media Studies Journal. Vol. 15, no. 1. (Summer 2001) p. 54. 23 Jacqueline E. Sharkey. War, Censorship, and the First Amendment. Media Studies Journal. Vol. 15, no. 1. (Summer 2001.) pp. 20-21. 24 Russell (2004). The Evolution of War Reporting from the Crimea to Iraq. p. 33.
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saidthe outcome of the war is of vital personal concern to the future of every American citizen.25 Veteran CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite supports censorship in the case of full access to the battlefront. Theyve obviously got to be sure that we are not releasing any military secrets in the copy we file thereafter. I believe in censorship. It worked pretty well.26 The press notice for D-Day (June 6, 1944) indicated that each corps beaching at Normandy that day would be accompanied by seven war reporters, three photographers, two public relations officers, two radio operators and two driver-messengers. Four censors also accompanied each battalion. Stories filed from the battlefield had to be submitted to the censors before they were transmitted electronically for publication, and any copy carried by boat was checked in the United Kingdom before being transmitted.27 During operations in Korea, there was no official censorship until Chinese intervention in the war in 1950. When commanders complained that sensitive information such as notices of troop movement and the existence of a new fighter plane were being released via the American press, reporters were required to submit their stories to Army and Air Force censors. The government also established a Japan-based censorship office for television footage in March 1951.28 Only during the war in Vietnam were reporters truly free of most government intervention (this will be discussed at length in section I of this paper, Traditional and Historical Blocks to Access).
Byron Price. What Can and What Cannot be Printed in War Time. Congressional Digest. Feb. 1942. pp. 36-37. 26 Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting from the Front. p. 14. 27 Hernandez, Debra Gersh. The Simple Days of War Coverage. Editor & Publisher. Vol. 127, no. 31. (July 30, 1994) 28 James Aronson. The Press and the Cold War. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.
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The third factor, capacity for real-time satellite-uplinked visual coverage of a war has only been a consideration for less than two decades. Satellite-based live feed for both print and broadcast journalists went from sporadic and expensive in the late 1980s and early 1990s to prevalent by the time of the conflict in Bosnia in 1992.29 In Operation Iraqi Freedom, advanced technologyincluding internet filing and broadcastingpresented its own set of difficulties, explored in the second part of this paper, New Restrictions, New Considerations. Before the start of operations in Iraq in 2003, journalists, of course, were unable to anticipate the combination of mitigating factors that would prevent embedded journalists from seeing the full scope of the conflict during Iraqi Freedom. In 1992, reporters and journalism scholars made a list, a statement of principles, of the failures of military-press cooperation after the end of the Vietnam War. The press essentially wanted the military and Defense Department to correct what they physical access to the battlefield during combat, unlike what was granted in Grenada; an end to the pool system that so disappointed reporters during first Gulf War; and perhaps most idealisticallythey did not want to submit stories to official military censors. 30
Edith M Lederer. From Telex to Satellite. Media Studies Journal. Vol. 15, no. 1. (Summer 2001) pp. 18-19. 30 Principles that should govern future arrangements for news coverage from the battlefield of the United States military in combat. Adopted Aug. 11, 1992. Courtesy of Poynter Online. http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=6242&sid=44 1.Open and independent reporting will be the principal means of coverage of U.S. military operations. 2. Press pools are not to serve as the standard means of covering U.S. military operations. Pools may sometimes provide the only feasible means of early access to a military operation. Pools should be as large as possible and disbanded at the earliest opportunity (within 24 to 36 hours when possible). The arrival of early access pools will not cancel the principle of independent coverage for journalists already in the area. 3. Even under conditions of open coverage, pools may be appropriate for specific events, such as those at extremely remote locations or where space is limited. 4. Journalists in a combat zone will be credentialed by the U.S. military and will be required to abide by a clear set of military security ground rules that protect U.S. forces and their operations. Violation of the ground rules can result in
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The great irony of the embedding program is that while the Defense Department acquiesced to all of these demands,31 more subtle and pervasive obstacles to access cropped up in their place. Embedded reporters experienced legal, physical, ideological, and emotional blocks to unfettered reporting that narrowed their field of vision. The first part of this paper examines, in the context of the conflicts leading up to the 2003 Iraq War, more traditional obstacles to access, such as legal blocks, denial of physical admission to the field of combat, and military distrust of press motives. For instance, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt faced legal obstacles to access when his bid to send reporters with special operations troops to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 failed on appeal in federal court. The first section discussed the scaling back of reporter access to U.S. combat operations that happened in the mid-1970s, and the slow return of reporters to the thick of combat operations between 1975 and 2003. Some veteran war reporters believe that the optimum level of access to battlefield operations was achieved during U.S. operations in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975, and that reporters have since been prevented from returning to that ideal because
suspension of credentials and expulsion of the journalist involved from the combat zone. News organizations will make their best efforts to assign experienced journalists to combat operations and to make them familiar with U.S. military operations. 5. Journalists will be provided access to all major military units. Special operations restrictions may limit access in some cases. 6. Military public affairs officers should act as liaisons but should not interfere with the reporting process. 7. Under conditions of open coverage, field commanders should be instructed to permit journalists to ride on military vehicles and aircraft whenever feasible. The military will be responsible for the transportation of pools. 8. Consistent with its capabilities, the military will supply PAOs with facilities to enable timely, secure, compatible transmission of pool material and will make these facilities available whenever possible for filing independent coverage. In cases when government facilities are unavailable, journalists will, as always, file by any other means available. The military will not ban communications systems operated by news organizations, but electromagnetic operational security in battlefield situations may require limited restrictions on the use of such systems. 31 Donald Rumsfeld. Public affairs guidance (PAG). February 2003. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2003/d20030228pag.pdf. Sec. 1. Media will be embedded with unit personnel at air and ground forces bases and afloat to ensure a full understanding of all operations.
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military higher-ups believe that negative media coverage influenced public opinion and lost the military the war in Vietnam.32 The first part ends with an explanation of how the Pentagon and the Defense Department sought to reach out to the American press through the embedding program, and sought to provide for access and freedom from censorship that would at least match the level of freedom achieved during the Vietnam conflict. The second section explores new obstacles to battlefield access that were unique both to the embedded reporter and to the Iraq War. Access to combat action, unlike in Vietnam, depended on the embedded reporters unit assignment, and even more on the mode of transportation the unit used, satellite uplink access, the caprice of the commanding officereven the weather. Some embedded reporters who saw a lot of combat with their assigned units, and the others saw little or none at all. Journalists embedded with infantry units often spent long, cramped days on the road to Baghdad riding in virtually windowless Bradley fighting vehicles, exiting only to sleep and camp. One of the reporters who died during the push toward Baghdad, David Bloom of NBC, suffered from a fatal pulmonary embolism that may have been caused by sitting in a cramped Bradley.33 During the initial push toward the capital, many military units told their embeds that they did not have time for the reporters to stop in the small villages along the roadeither hostile or friendlyto gauge the reactions of ordinary Iraqi citizens to the war. Safety considerations necessitated that
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Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting From the Front. See e.g.: Schieffer, p. 20. Vietnam was maybe the last and maybe the only war in American history where there was no censorship. Also: Cronkite, p. 16. [T]he press has never since had the kind of freedom that it had in Vietnam It was that kind of freedom and that lack of censorship that sufferedthe old army command from Vietnam, many of them blamed the press and television for losing the war for them. 33 Frederik Balfour. David Blooms Last Ride. Business Week. April 7, 2003. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2003/nf2003047_8783_db071.htm.
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the journalists travel along with them, leaving precious little time to interview ordinary Iraqi citizensand few translators were available if the time was there. What was always available was access to conversation with soldiers; and their points of view. George Wilsons dogsled analogy made itself manifest as embeds got to know the soldiers and operations of their units intimately, but had only fleeting glimpses of the effect of the war past the muzzles of the units guns.34 Adding to the aspect of luck of the draw that defined embedding, the way in which the journalist was received by the unitpositively, negatively, or ambivalentlyvaried by unit assignment. Certain commanders were more open and less skeptical of embeds, while suspicion and distrust prevailed with others. For instance, William Branigin of The Washington Post said that he received unexpected support from unit commanders when he told them he intended to cover the mistaken shooting of a vanload of Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers at a security checkpoint.35 On the other hand, Brett Lieberman of the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Patriot-News, despite being well liked by his unit, got into a shouting match with a Marine lieutenant colonel and the units public affairs officer over a story in which he reported on some of the technical capabilities of the unit. Lieberman had run all of the information he planned to use in the story by the Marine battalion commanders he spoke to, but they had not gone up the chain of command to verify that the information did not violate any of the ground rulessuch as explicitly giving away troop position or strengthlaid out in Secretary of Defense Rumsfelds public affairs
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See note 7. Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson. Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. Guilford (Conn.): The Lyons Press, 2003. p. 233. The military commanders all said from day one that they understood embedding was going to be for better or for worse.
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memo.36 Liebermann was disembeddedcommanded to leave his unit and return to the U.S.37 As much as access depended on the attitudes of commanding officers toward the press, it also depended on the news organization with which the embed was affiliated. Fox News channel correspondent Rick Levanthal reported being very well received by the Second Battalion, 23rd Marines because of the perception that Foxs coverage in the run-up to the war had been overwhelmingly pro-Bush administration, pro-war.38 On the other side of the spectrum, Al-Jazeera reporter Amr El-Kakhy told of being purposely left out of briefings because of his affiliation with the station.39 Part II also addresses how media star power affected accessboth positively and negatively. Embed and Nightline (ABC) anchor Ted Koppel could easily break from his assigned unit to get a broader view of the conflict, because his distinguished career brought him name recognition that other journalists did not have.40 Star power and a troop-friendly network affiliation, however, were not enough to stop the disembedding of former network talk show host and Fox News
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Rumsfeld (2003). Public affairs guidance (PAG). Sec. 4. Ground Rules. The following categories of information are not releasableSpecific number of aircraftspecific number of troops. 37 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 321. The story ran in Saturdays paper. Around Saturday morning about 6:00 a.m. when we got up, I found that I had an appointment at the Public Affairs OfficeLater that day, they told me to get my gear and leave Echo Company. 38 Ibid. p. 192. [The troops] appreciated [Fox News Networks] tone of coverage. Fox was supportive of the troops, supportive of the U.S. efforts in the war. 39 Ibid. p. 182. I asked the duty officer why I wasnt invited to that briefingHe returned and said, I asked the colonel. He said, You know, guys, [Al-Jazeera is] a station with a reputation. 40 Ibid. p. 98. [Koppel] had more access to helicopters and vehicles to move around and see things. He could report on the grand scheme of things.
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special correspondent Geraldo Rivera, who was booted from his unit for drawing a rough map in the sand suggesting troop position during a live broadcast.41 Section two also addresses the technological limitations of embeddingor, rather, the unexpected limitations of having an arsenal of new reporting technology at ones fingertips. For instance, the units occasionally observed dark periods, in which all electronic equipment had to be shut down. Deadlines, even for real-time television stories, fell victim to the security needs of the military unit. A few days into the invasion, all Thuraya brand satellite telephones were confiscated from reporters and others because Central Command had received intelligence that the satellite encryption codes for that brand of phone had been hacked. Additionally, journalists lost laptops, cameras, and satellite phones in combat and by accident. Reporters stated penchant for allowing the troops to use their communication equipment to talk to loved ones at home also compromised unfettered access, and to some minds caused a conflict of interest and emotional investment, which is discussed in the third section of the paper. The third section looks at some of the more amorphous and subjective obstacles to access. Many embedded reporters openly admitted that they began to feel affection and kinship with the soldiers in their unit. Some would refer to the fighting squads as we instead of they.42 Few embeds, however, actually said that their emotional attachment compromised their
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Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 140. [W]e looked up and this Humvee pulled up and Geraldo [Rivera] got outWe interviewed him and asked him about what he was doing and where he was going. He downplayed the fact that he was being kicked out. 42 See e.g.: Julia R. Fox and Byungho Park. The I of Embedded Reporting: An Analysis of CNN Coverage of the Shock and Awe Campaign. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. Vol. 50, no. 1. (2006) pp. 36-51. Hypothesis 2 predicted that embedded journalists would use the inclusive pronoun we in its various forms[the hypothesis] is supported by the comparison of references to the reporter and the troops.
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objectivity.43 Many more said that the limited view of the war afforded by being stuck with their units was the major factor in producing unbalanced coverage.44 The way that reporters coverage was affected by how editors and TV channels used and edited the raw filed material will also be discussed in Part III. Editors in the print format could make choices as to what parts of the story would run, and photo editors could decide not to run pictures if they were too graphic. U.S. TV audiences were still eager to see the effects of the war, which may have resulted in what some press scholars call the sanitizing of war. If all the viewers can see on the screen are flashes of light from infrared images of bombing raids, or explosions lighting the horizon behind a reporters head, they tend to think of aerial bombardment as safe, targeted, and tend to ignore the inevitable human cost.45 I will also address the possibility of a 9/11 effectan unquantifiable but increased nationalistic sentiment stemming from outrage over the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I argue, as do many communication theorists and professional journalists,
43 Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting from the Front. p. 112. Regardless of what any embedded reporter says, it was impossible not to lose some of your objectivity. These were the men and women who were feeding you, protecting you, and befriending you. Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 53. It always amuses me when reporters say, Oh, you know, I have no feelings about an issue, or Im totally objective. I dont see how anybody can do it. Thats what editors are forto make sure that your copy comes out objective. 44 See Note 9. 45 See e.g.: Christopher Bollyn. Mainstream Medias Sanitized War Coverage Helps Mask Carnage. AmericanFreePress.net. Apr. 12, 2004. http://www.americanfreepress.net/03_28_03/Mainstream_Media_s_Sanitized_/mainstream_media_s_s anitized.html. The sanitized view of the war presented by the U.S. media is dominated by longdistance photos of missile attacks and battlefield scenes reported by reporters who are traveling with U.S. and British soldiers.The Arab world sees pictures of bloodied bodies of young children. They watch scenes crowded with corpses, including gruesome images of dead American soldiers. Americans see almost none of that
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that effects of 9/11 lingered both in the minds of embeds and on the editors and anchors who shaped their stories a year and a half after the event.46 The fourth section concludes the paper with a recap of the various realities and mentalities that prevented individual embeds wide-scope war coverage.
See e.g.: Nancy Snow. Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Also: Media, War and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management During the 2003 Iraq War. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Vol. 3, no. 1. (Mar. 2006) pp. 48-69; The Times and Iraq. (News staff). The New York Times. May 26, 2004.
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Chapter 2: Traditional and Historical Blocks to Access
Vietnam through Gulf War I: Lessons Vietnam was the first time in American history in which reporters were subject to little or no official government censorship. In the first years of the war (1961-1965), regulations about journalists presence and their news product were lax to nonexistent.47 Formal censorship, such as the system of submission to official military censors of all outgoing news stories employed in World War II, was considered in 1965 because of heightening coverage of military operations.48 The idea was eventually discarded. Reporters had only to abide by a list of ground rules aimed at preserving military security, but could otherwise operate as they chose.49 In any case, restrictions put in place for the purposes of protecting American forces have historically met with little resistance from the press, and are unlikely to
Phillip Knightley. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University press, 2002 (revised edition). The mechanics of becoming accredited were straightforward. The correspondent applied to his nearest South Vietnamese embassy for an entry visa. It was usually granted. In Saigon, the correspondent reported to the U.S. authorities with a letter from his newspaper requesting accreditation and accepting responsibility for him. The correspondent was then issued an accreditation card[and] signed an agreement to abide by a set of fifteen ground rules, dealing mainly with preserving military security, and was on his way. 48 Daniel C. Hallin. The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. p. 114. More than half of televisions coverage in these early years (1965-1967) was concerned with military operations. 49 David L. Anderson and John Ernst. The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. p. 276. Although these ground rules changed slightly from time to time, restricted information generally fell into the following categories: 1. future plans, operations, or strikes; 2. rules of engagement; 3. amounts of ordnance or fuel 4. exact numbers and types or identification of casualties suffered by friendly units; 5. during an operation, unit designations and troop movementsuntil officially released by [Military Advisory Command, Vietnam]; 6. intelligence unit activities; and 7. air operations against North Vietnam. Also: Joe Galloway. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Reporting the Story. Apr. 20, 2000. "You had that press card, you agreed to a simple list of rules. That press card would take you anywhere. You could go anywhere and stay as long as you wanted to.
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do so. Such commonsense restrictions include a ban on reporting specific troop movements, the state of supply lines and/or reinforcements, and unexecuted battle plans. The guidelines that embedded reporters were to review and sign before departing for the Middle East to cover operations in March 2003 very closely resembled those employed in Vietnam including an acknowledgement that embeds would refrain from reporting [s]pecific number of troops[s]pecific number of aircraft equipment ships [n]ames of military installations or specific geographical locations of military units [i]nformation regarding future operations [and]force protection measuresrules of engagement[i]nformation regarding intelligence collection activities and more.50 Every single embedded reporter signed off on these guidelines before taking a unit assignment. Rare indeed is the reporter on either side of a conflict who wants to take responsibility for jeopardizing missions by inadvertently or intentionally informing the enemy of classified plans. In the case of Vietnam, the lack of formal censorship stemmed in part from the American government policy against acknowledging official U.S. participation in driving back the North Vietnamese.51 At the beginning of combat operations in 1961, the U.S. Army policy was one of maximum information to the press.52 Reporters had been in Vietnam since even before the Buddhist uprising of 1963 and were well established by the time unrest in the country leapt into American public
50
Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 4. Hallin (1986). The Uncensored War. p. 29. [T]he Kennedy administration did not consider the home front entirely secure, and its public information policies were generally designed to keep American involvement in Vietnam out of the news. 52 Army Regulation 360-5, 1961. [t]he American public has a right to maximum information concerning the Army and its activities. Defense Department and Army policy require maximum disclosure of information except for that which would be of material assistance to potential enemies. The Army Public Affairs Program. www.asaie.army.mil/Public/IE/Toolbox/documents/r360_1.pdf.
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consciousness after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964.53 By the time censorship may have been considered, conflicting policy decisions had already eroded news organizations trust in the military and the government. A February 1962 communiqu from the U.S Information Agency and Department of Defense, known as Cable 1006, said that press relations should be conducted with an eye to reinforcing the idea that the conflict was a purely South Vietnamese operation, with American help on the periphery.54 U.S. policymakers, in fact, saw the war on broader terms than simply militaryseeking to convey a sense of futility for the North Vietnamese cause to Communist centers in Peking and Moscow. Amid contradictory policy decisions aimed simultaneously at showing determination in the face of the North Vietnamese forces and keeping the conflict off the domestic policy agenda, MACV on unstable ground as to how to treat the press.55 The U.S. Government is prepared to join the Viet-Nam Government in a sharply increased joint effort to avoid a further deterioration in the situation in South Viet-Nam, read the statement, which was declassified in 1976.56 As historian Daniel C. Hallin notes, the fact of sending U.S. forces into combat took away some of the governments ability to control what was news and what was not. By the time it was released in 1962, Cable 1006 was moot: In October 1961there were only a handful of officialswhom journalists regarded as authoritative. By the next spring the story could be covered from a very different
Hallin (1986). The Uncensored War. p. 15. William M. Hammond. Public Affairs: The Military and the Media 1962-1968. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988. p. 15. 55 Hallin (1986). The Uncensored War. p. 36. 56 National Security Action Memorandum. November 22, 1961.
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level and perspectivefrom the perspective of the Americans in the field who were fighting and administering [the political agenda].57 Judging by retrospectives written by veteran journalists it would appear that all reporters want to return to the unfettered access of the Vietnam conflict, while the government is working at all costs and sometimes at cross-purposes with the press to avoid another Vietnamat least with regard to war reporting. "Vietnam was the most free press exercise in the history of this country," former United Press International reporter Joe Galloway told PBS during a retrospective on reporting in Vietnam.58 General William C. Westmoreland, who was commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, essentially substantiated this notion in a Time magazine interview in 1982. Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship, Westmoreland said.59 However, unfettered access was only a single factor in a complex brew that created the climate of mutual press-military distrust post-Vietnam. Maj. Gen. Winant Sidle, who held various public affairs positions in the Army from 1967 to 1975and whose panel would famously investigate the role of the press in the war in Grenada eight years afterwardblamed lazy reporters in Vietnam in part for encouraging American sentiment to turn against the war. There were too many reporters unwilling to check stories before filingsome believed [the Army] wouldnt give them facts; some felt it was unnecessary to check.60 Certainly, a handful of reporters in Vietnam produced one-sided reports because they were afraid to go into combat.
Hallin (1986). The Uncensored War. (introduction.) The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Reporting the Story. Apr. 20, 2000. 59 Thomas Griffith. Reagans TV Troubles. Time. Apr. 5, 1982. 60 Salisbury, Harrison E. Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons From a War. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. p. 111. The Role of Journalists in Vietnam: An Army Generals Perspective.
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The MACV (accreditation) card would admit the correspondent to the daily briefing on the wars progress given at the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO)If he was prepared to believe JUSPAO, a correspondent could cover the war simply by attending the briefings each day.61 On the other side of the coin, plenty of correspondents would attach themselves to an outgoing convoy and place themselves right in the middle of the actionand the danger.62 Former CBS Washington producer William Small said, A case can be made, and certainly should be examined, that [seeing the effects of fighting in near-real time] was cardinal to the disillusionment of Americans with this war.63 As the conflict in Vietnam went on, editors became hungrier for combat footage, former Independent Television News (ITN) reporter Richard Lindley said. Before they (the editors) were satisfied with a corpsethen they had to have people dying in action.64 Lists of soldiers missing and killed in action would appear on the television screen every night, and the evening news was peppered with combat footage spliced into stand-up reels filmed in Saigon. And the turnaround for footage was quick; noncombatant U.S. citizens on the other side of the world could see what was going on with reasonable contemporaneity. CBS television reporter Bob Schieffer, who covered Vietnam early in his career, said if the reports were especially time-sensitive, reporters asked their news networks to charter a jet and have the film
Knightley (2002 rev. ed.). The First Casualty. p. 403. Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting From The Front. p. 16. [In Vietnam] you just heard of a group that was going out on patrol and you hitched along with them. You got as far as they got, and then when they started hacking their way through the jungle, you hitched along with them. 63 Knightley (2002 rev. ed.). The First Casualty. p. 411. 64 Ibid. p. 410.
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sent a couple of hours away to Hong Kong or Tokyo, where the footage would be assembled and sent by satellite to New York.65 In the military it became part of this lore that it was the fault of the press that the war turned badly. It wasnt. The American people lost faith and turned on the war because of the casualties.66 Hallin argues, in contrast, that it was not lazy journalism, or the bloody consequences of war appearing on television screens, that turned the U.S. public off to the war effort. 67 It was the perception of the soldiers on the ground that the war effort itself was turning sour, a sentiment that television reporters would have picked up on by being in such close proximity to the troops.68 Speculating on strategy in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite famously pronounced the operations in Vietnam unwinnable.69 That comment won him, CBS, and news organizations in general no paltry number of detractors in the militarybut television viewers largely came to agree with him. The unprecedented ramifications of war on TV more deeply and completely polarized the military and the media. [T]he Pentagon started blaming the press for standing in the way of victory, while the press accused the Pentagon of lying about the war, according to an oral history of the embedding program in Iraq.70 A 1995 study, co-authored by Frank Aukofer of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and retired Navy Vice Admiral William P. Lawrence, noted that 64 percent of the military
Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting from the Front. p. 21. Ibid. p. 23 67 Hallin (1986). The Uncensored War. pp. 129-130. Of 167 film reports and voice-over storiesbefore the (1968) Tet Offensive, only 16 had more than one video shot of the dead or wounded. 68 Ibid. p. 134. [T]elevision reported the war from [soldiers] point of view, and as long as they remained supportive of it, there would be the strong tendency for television to be so as well. 69 Report From Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why? CBS News. February 27, 1968. 70 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. xii.
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officers surveyed in the opinion poll believe strongly or somewhat strongly that news coverage of events in Vietnam harmed the war effort. According to Aukofer and Lawrence, 70 percent of press representatives entirely disagreed with that characterization. 71 With Vietnam, the rift of mistrust between the Pentagon and the press was passed to the next generation of reporters and military personnel. Later military campaigns launched by the U.S. Department of Defense featured harsh restrictions on war coverage. The U.S. invasion of the small island nation of Grenada, on October 25, 1983, saw the introduction of the Department of Defense News Media Pool. The group of journalists invited by the Defense Department to form the pool, however, was not allowed onshore during the initial invasion, was detained on the nearby island of Barbados, and was prevented from reporting live from Grenada itself until nearly three days after offensive operations began. On October 27, two days after the initial invasion, a small contingent of only 15 or so reporters from the entire poolwhich totaled about 600were able to take a guided tour of the island. But the Defense Department grounded the media plane so reporters couldn't file their stories until after [President Ronald] Reagan gave a speech on the invasion. 72 On Oct. 30, reporters finally enjoyed unlimited access to Grenada but had to resort to footage and eyewitness accounts from military sources.
Frank Aukofer and Vice Adm. William Lawrence. Americas Team, The Odd Couple: A Report on the Relationship Between the Media and the Military. The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center (Vanderbilt University), 1995. http://www.freedomforum.org/publications/first/mediaandthemilitary/americasteamfull.pdf. Although similar themes of polarization and patriotism within the American viewership again came up during the conflict in Iraq, they will not be addressed in this paper. 72 Blame Grenada! American invasion of tiny Caribbean island changed everything for press. (2001).
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The press outcry over this prompted then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger to issue the Principles of Information: It is the policy of the Department of Defense to make available timely and accurate information so that members representing the press, radio, and television may assess and understand the facts about national security and defense strategy. Requests for information from organizations and private citizens will be answered responsively and as rapidly as possible.73 Press representatives decided this was too vagueand an excuse to continue to withhold information. They drew up their own Statement of Principles, released in early 1984, demanding that the Defense Department reexamine media access during combat operations. Initial response seemed promising; then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Vessey picked by-then-retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Winant Sidle to head up a committee, the Military-Media Relations Panel (Sidle Panel), composed of major press representatives and public affairs officers from the Defense Department. From the Sidle Panels recommendations came the formalization of the pool system that would be used in the next two major U.S. military operationsin Panama in 1989, and again in Iraq in 1991 during the first Persian Gulf War. Neither engagement worked to the satisfaction of the media, though the Sidle Panel report had recommended both access to the media pool and a reliance on media agreement to a predetermined set of ground rules rather than having each story pass through a censorship committee outright. Strategic Studies Institute scholar Pascale Combelles-Siegel reported that, during operations in Panama, the military established a routine by which pool journalists could file three 600-word dispatches within the
73
Caspar W. Weinberger. Principles of Information. Dec. 1, 1983. (U.S. Department of Defense).
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first two hours of the pools arrival in the combat zone. Pool reporters soon complained that their news organizations had taken on considerable expense to send them, only to be faced with limited dispatches and long periods of non-newsworthy coverage because the reporters could not observe action directly.74 The first war in the Persian Gulf, 1991s Operation Desert Shield, saw a sort of proto-embedding development in the pool system. Pools would move with troop units. The Persian Gulf War was not an operationin which reporters could travel the front in jeeps, or like Vietnam where reporters could take a helicopter to specific points of action, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Pete Williams wrote in a March 1991 Washington Post editorial. American ground units moved quickly some of them by air. To cover the conflict, reporters had to be part of a unit, able to move with it.75 The problem with this was that pools usually consisted of one representative from each of the news mediai.e.: one photographer, one print reporter, one television reporter, and one radio reporter. About 1,600 reporters showed up for the pools, but only 400 were assigned to pools with units. The rest had to stay at the base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, waiting for reports from the 400 embedded pool members. For the 1200 journalists who were not at the fightingthe press pools were an unneeded restriction, hampering the coverage of the war, according to one scholar.76 Even Vice President Richard Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense
74
Pascale Combelles-Siegel. The Troubled Path to the Pentagon's Rules on Media Access to the Battlefield: Grenada to Today. Strategic Studies Institute (publisher). 1996. http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB325.pdf. 75 Pete Williams. View From the Pentagon: Lets Face It, This Was the Best War Coverage Weve Ever Had. The Washington Post. Mar. 19, 1991. p. D1. 76 David Benjamin. Censorship in the Gulf. (self-published). http://web1.duc.auburn.edu/~benjadp/gulf/gulf.html.
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during the first Gulf War, said that the 1991 conflict was the best-covered war in history, but acknowledged some of its failings in press relations. They (the press corps) dont like this at all. They fundamentally disagree because they felt managed and controlled I also think its fair to say its a legitimate criticism for them to make. Access was very uneven.77 The Sidle Panels ground rules formulation would remain a component of Defense Department policy up to and including the embedding program used during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the pool system failed miserably in the eyes of reporters. Both Operations Just Cause in Panama, and Desert Shield in Iraq, essentially contravened the recommendations of the Sidle Panel report, so journalists cried foul once more. Journalists gathered to revise the Statement of Principles, releasing them in August 1992this time with a condemnation of the pool system: Press pools are not to serve as the standard means of covering U.S. military operations. Pools may sometimes provide the only feasible means of early access to a military operation. Pools should be as large as possible and disbanded at the earliest opportunity (within 24 to 36 hours when possible). The arrival of early access pools will not cancel the principle of independent coverage for journalists already in the area.78 The press also made a far more nebulous but still persuasive argument for access in the Principles.79 Journalists argued that their tradition of accompanying soldiers on the battlefield was a key pillar of American democracy because it serves
Pentagon Considers Embedding Journalists in Fighting Units. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Oct. 2001. http://www.rcfp.org/news/2001/1001ppools.html. 78 Principles that should govern future arrangements for news coverage from the battlefield of the United States military in combat. 79 Ibid. Journalists will be provided access to all major military units. Special operations restrictions may limit access in some cases.
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the people's right to know.80 More importantly, however, the Principles reiterated what journalists had been trying to get across since the fallout from Vietnam: the pool system and the various ways in which the government strove to make it work from 1975 into the early twenty-first century, constituted a block to press access to combat.
Moving Toward a New Policy By the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., the perception of the press by the military, and vice versa, were established and accepted by both parties. A law scholar says, The stereotypes are well-entrenched: a cavalier media chasing a scoop regardless of consequences and a short-sighted military sacrificing constitutional rights for strategic ends. As a result, embedding appears to put two of our most important prioritiesprotecting free speech and preserving national securityinto inevitable conflict.81 Zeide notes that this is a vast oversimplification, but it is fair to say that the Defense Department was back at the drawing board regarding press relations. Shortly after 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put his assistant secretary for public affairs, Victoria Clarke, in charge of revising the Pentagons media relations policies in a time of heightened security and national alarm.82 Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Clarke and Rumsfeld began to meet with the Washington
Combelles-Siegel (1996). The Troubled Path to the Pentagon's Rules on Media Access to the Battlefield: Grenada to Today. 81 Elana J. Zeide. Note: In Bed With the Military: First Amendment Implications of Embedded Journalism. New York University Law Review. Vol. 80, no. 1309. (October 2005.) 82 Andrew Cortell, Robert Eisigner, and Scott Althaus. Why Embed? Explaining the Bush Administrations Decision to Embed Reproters in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. American Behavioral Scientist. (forthcoming, 2009)
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bureau chiefs of various news organizations to discuss strategy for battlefield news coverage during any future U.S. military operations. We are in a whole new world here," Clarke said at a September 28, 2001 meeting with news bureau chiefs before the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. We're trying to figure out the rules of the road. We are trying to figure out how to work with you, how to make sure you get what you need ... while protecting the national security and the safety of the men and women in uniform.83 However, full battlefield access was once again denied to reporters during operations in Afghanistan. The country was a dangerous place for reporters American or otherwisein 2001 and 2002. For instance, four Spanish and Italian reporters were gunned down on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul on Nov. 19, 2001.84 The safety situation was one of the reasons that the Pentagon gave for denying reporters access to certain areas of combat. The Defense Department also told reporters that most of the operations in the country were being carried out by Special Forces troops, and that having a reporter tag along would disrupt operational security and eliminate the element of surprise. But the government was actively stalling attempts by reporters to reach certain areas and cover certain operations in the country, as well. On Dec. 5, 2001, reporters were sequestered in a warehouse after a friendly-fire bombing incident that killed five U.S. soldiers and wounded 19, so they could not have access to survivors or attending medics.85
83
Pentagon Considers Embedding Journalists in Fighting Units. Assignment: Afghanistan NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Online NewsHour special. Nov. 20, 2001. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec01/reporting_11-20.html. 85 Neil Hickey. Access Denied: The Pentagons War Reporting Rules are the Toughest Ever. Columbia Journalism Review. January/February 2002. http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2002/1/afghanhickey.asp.
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Press access to operations in Afghanistan also faced legal obstacles. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt petitioned Victoria Clarke, Donald Rumsfelds assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, for permission to send a reporter to accompany one or more specific units in Afghanistan. Clarke rejected Flynts request for the purposes of security, saying that the majority of troops in the country were small special operations units whose objectives may be compromised by the presence of a reporter.86 Flynt brought suit in November 2001, calling into question the constitutionality of the Department of Defenses refusal.87 In his complaint, Flynt cited a Defense Department directive stipulating that open and independent reporting be the principal means of coverage of U.S. military operations.88 Flynts claim was dismissed by a district court, after which he appealed the case. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the lower courts ruling on constitutional grounds, saying that the First Amendments protection of free speech did not translate into a guarantee of battlefield access for the sake of presenting an accurate story to readers.89 An appeal to the Supreme Court was denied. Even Flynts legal team admitted there was very little standing case history to support the idea of a constitutional right to battlefield access.90
Flynt v. Rumsfeld, 359 U.S. App. D.C. 402 (2002). Clarke explained that the highly dangerous and unique nature of their work makes it very difficult to embed media with ground troops, but also stated that there had been "extensive" media access to other aspects of military operations. 87 Ibid. 88 Department of Defense Dir. 5122.5. Encl. 3. (Sept. 2000) 89 Flynt v. Rumsfeld. [T]his Court has held that freedom of speech [and] of the press do not create any per se right of access to government activities simply because such access might lead to more thorough or better reporting. JB Pictures, Inc. v. Dep't of Defense, 318 U.S. App. D.C. 162, 86 F.3d 236, 238 (D.C. Cir. 1996). 90 Ibid. Appellants admit they face a dearth of case law concerning press access to battles. Flynts legal team attempted to use the 1980 Supreme Court decision in Richmond Newspapers Inc v. Virginia (448 U.S. 555), that argued a constitutional right to access to prisons, as a parallel to battlefield access, but unsuccessfully.
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Legal scholar David A. Anderson has argued what is possibly a more legally viable alternative to pleading the constitutionality of journalist access to war zones.91 Andersons reasoning rests on legal precedent in the case of a hypothetical claim by the press of a right to receive information. In the Supreme Courts 1982 decision in Board of Education v. Pico, Justice William J. Brennan wrote that the right to receive ideas is a necessary predicate to the recipient's meaningful exercise of his own rights of speech, press, and political freedom.92 A legal claim, Anderson argues, could rest on the idea that the non-press public has the right to receive information barring that which would cause immediate harmfrom the press on American warfare. In 1971, Justice Hugo L. Black made it clear information on U.S. conduct of foreign wars was a constitutionally protected right: [P]aramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.93 The right of access to combat in order to provide information has received no judicial protection per Flynt v. Rumsfeld, but Anderson suggests that it may be in the governments best interest to grant reporters access to the battlefield when possible. The Pentagon agreedor at least it did prior to 9/11. Department of Defense Directive 5122.5, issued in September 2000, recommends media access to all major military units and that journalists should be permitted to ride on military vehicles and
91
David A. Anderson. Freedom of the Press in Wartime. University of Colorado Law Review. Vol. 77, no. 49. (Winter 2006) 92 457 U.S. 853 (1982) 93 New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
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with convoys when possible.94 In Flynts case, it hardly mattered that his appeals were denied, however: David Buchbinder, a reporter for Hustler, had already deployed to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Several stories Buchbinder filed at Hustler and other publications indicated that he had accompanied troops on at least one mission to look for Al Qaeda operatives.95 As evidenced in Flynt, the sluggishness of the judicial process could have been one of many factors that made the Defense Department look to head off further questions of battlefield access at the pass, as it were, by instituting the embedding program in full force in 2003.
Embedding Because journalists had once again had their expectations for reasonably open battlefield access in Afghanistan defeated, the beginning of the military-press partnership called embedding began in a climate of suspicion, wrote Washington Post correspondent Peter Baker. 96 The idea of embedding had its roots in conversations that took place before Afghanistan, but the nature of the conflict in that country turned out to be incompatible with the fledgling plan. In Afghanistan, for weeks all we had were very small numbers of Special Forces on the ground that infiltrated into very arduous conditionswhich was not conducive to being able to
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Department of Defense Directive 5122.5. Encl. 3. Flynt v. Rumsfeld. Once in Afghanistan, Buchbinder placed himself on a list of reporters awaiting access to ground units. Since his arrival in Afghanistan, Buchbinder has filed several stories, at least one of which shows he has accompanied troops on a search for al Qaeda operatives. 96 Baker (2003). Inside View.
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put any significant number of reporters on the ground, said Bryan Whitman, then the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.97 An Iraq incursion, the Defense Department reasoned, would be a more traditional warmuch more like World War II than Vietnam or Afghanistan, with established fronts and overt troop incursions rather than scattered units or secretive special-ops missions. The planned structure of the war lent itself to the structure of embedding. If another Afghanistan-like conflict faced the U.S. military in the future, Whitman said it would once again be hard to duplicate the access opportunities granted to reporters in Operation Iraqi Freedom.98 Having very little friendly press coverage during campaigns in Afghanistan, according to Rumsfeld, caused an unintended consequenceat least in the battle for hearts and minds in the Afghan countryside. As Rumsfeld said at one of the meetings with bureau chiefsin October 2002: In the case of Afghanistan there was a great degree of skill on the part of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in news management and they were able to co-locate their various military activities in close proximity to hospitals and nursing homes and schools and sympathy-engendering locations. To the extent they couldnt and some building was bombed, they would then take in some cases, actually physically take people from a hospital and take them over to a place that was bombed and pretend it was a clinic of some kind. Its helpful to the extent you have people who are journalists and are accurate and professional with you that can see those things on the ground when they happen.99 A major concern of Pentagon officials after Gulf War I had been Saddam Husseins use of Iraqi media to turn the tide of Iraqi sentiment against the American
Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting From the Front. p. 44. Ibid. p. 43. 99 News transcript, ASD PA Clarke Meeting with Bureau Chiefs. October 30, 2002. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t11012002_t1030sd.html.
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invaders by broadcasting graphic pictures of the destruction caused by U.S. bombing raids.100 Rumsfeld wanted an American perspective on combat operations to counter negative publicity by the Iraqis. Secretary Rumsfeld understood that if the American-led coalition failed to leverage the media in [Operation Iraqi Freedom], the enemy might win the information battle by using the media to their advantage, wrote Col. Glenn T. Starnes in a 2004 Center for Strategic Leadership paper on the embedding program.
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Rumsfeld decided that, to the extent that it could be done, media would be as close
to ground operations as possible in Iraqboth to satisfy media representatives and as a preventive measure with regard to negative enemy-sponsored propaganda.102 The Department of Defense, and Rumsfeld in particular, theorized that the war effort would benefit in aggregate from the presence of reporters, even if some of the stories they reported painted American troops in an unflattering light. We need to tell the factual storygood and badbefore others seed the media with disinformation and distortion, Rumsfeld wrote in a February 10, 2003 Public Affairs Guidance (PAG) memo (discussed below and included as Appendix I to this paper). Bryan Whitman said the Defense Department began planning the embedding program in late summer or early fall, 2002.103 Suggestions from the meetings with the
Col. Glenn T. Starnes. Leveraging the Media. Center for Strategic Leadership (U.S. Army War College) Strategy Research Paper. Vol. S04-06. p. 4. (July 2004.) In 1991 Saddam Hussein controlled the media in Baghdad, using it as a propaganda tool to show the death and destruction caused by the coalition bombing. 101 Ibid. p. 4. 102 Ibid. p. 2. In consultation with (ASD PA) Clarke, Secretary Rumsfeld chose to implement the Embedded Media Program because he understood that the media coverage of the war would shape public perception of the National Security Environment. The technology used by the media to report instantaneously from distant locations, along with the rise of non-American news agencieswould overpower military public relations efforts. 103 Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting from the Front. p. 42.
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bureau chiefs began to shape the program; Secretary Rumsfeld himself was often present at these meetings to give briefings to members of the press on his goals and objectives. In late 2002 and early 2003, as an invasion of Iraq was more and more inevitable, Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to the public affairs officers who would be traveling with the fighting forces during an invasion. It was titled Public Affairs Guidance (PAG) on Embedding Media During Possible Future Operations/Deployments in the U.S. Central Commands Area of Responsibility (AOR), and officially released on Feb. 10, 2003. It was meant to be the official set of guidelines for military public affairs officers with regard to embedded reporters. 104 A 2003 article by Andrew Bushell and Brent Cunningham challenged Rumsfelds PAG memo, predicting that the promised access and advantages to embedding would fall just as flat as former promises made to the media by military and Defense Department personnel.105 The published article [by Cunningham and Bushell] indicated that our media embed program was just a frontthat we would never grant the level of access that we said we would give, said Maj. Tim Blair, who served with the Defense Departments Media Operations division.106 The policy promises were an improvement over the situation in Afghanistan, Bushell and Cunningham wrote: For instance, in Afghanistan reporters were not allowed to identify soldiers by name and hometown; in Iraq they will be allowed to do so with the soldiers' consent. Also, the new ground rules state that the reporters' safety is not reason
Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Brent Cunningham and Andrew Bushell. Being There. Columbia Journalism Review. Apr./May 2003. http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2003/2/pentagon-bushell.asp. 106 Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting From the Front. p. 49
105 104
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to exclude them from an operation, and that the standard for release of information is Why Not Release?, rather than Why Release? However, they argued: The devil is in the details. The leaked document is intended as a guide for public affairs officers. Specific ground rules for each unit, according to Major Tim Blair, the military's media contact on embedding, will be established when reporters get to their units. And those ground rules will change from mission to mission and location to location, he says. The military's guiding principle on embedding is security at the source, which essentially means that individual unit commanders will have considerable say over what reporters can and cannot do.107 It stands to reason that after decades of mistrust, the policy goals contained in the PAG memo may have seemed to writers like Cunningham and Bushell too expansiveeven permissiveto be true. The memo promised, among other things: Media will have long-term, minimally restrictive access to U.S. air, ground, and naval forces. Media will be given access to operational combat missions, including mission preparation and debriefing, whenever possible. To the extent possible, space on military transportation will be made available for media equipment necessary to cover a particular operation. No communications equipment for use by media in the conduct of their duties will be specifically prohibited. If the document was to be taken literally, operations in Iraq in 2003 would be different from Panama and Grenada in that access would be long-term and with few restrictions. It would differ from the first Gulf War in that reporters would not mostly
107
Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG).
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be sequestered at central command, but participate in operational combat missions. And reporters would not be forced to find their own transportation into the combat zone, as in the first weeks of operations in Afghanistan, but would be provided with military transport sanctioned for both them and their gear. But veteran war reporters say that the gap between what the civilians at the Pentagon envision and what goes on in the field under military command can be large.108 Bushell and Cunningham also took exception to Rumsfelds statements about using the media as leverage in the PAG memo. Among other things, Rumsfeld wrote, Media coverage of any future operation will, to a large extent, shape public perception of the national security environment now and in the years ahead. This holds true for the U.S. public; the public in allied countries whose opinion can affect the durability of our coalition; and publics in countries where we conduct operations.109 Members of the military believed that stating their blunt intention to use the media as a promotional device would be unpopular with the press itself. Just before operations began in Iraq, Lt. Col. Margaret H. Belknap, of the U.S. Military Academy, cautioned military personnel about media distrust in an article in the schools quarterly journal, Parameters. The notion of using the media understandablyif not invariablywill cause serious concerns for skeptical and independent reporters and editors. The intent may not be to dupe anyone, however. There is certainly nothing sinister implied in suggesting that the military use the media as a conduit to accurately and honestly convey information to the American people about the operations
108 109
Cunningham and Bushell (2003). Being There. Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 1.
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in which their military is engaged.110 As the embedding program was conceived, news organizations or freelance reporters would apply for embedding slots, which would be doled out in proportion to the size of the news outlet. Those journalists given an embedding slot would function as part of their assigned uniteating, sleeping, sharing space, and traveling with the soldiers. They would be protected by the unit, but also exposed to the same dangers. The PAG memo stipulated that transportation to combat operations should, if at all possible, be allowed to any embed requesting it, that Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (with the fitting acronym NBC) gear would be provided free of charge to embeds. Notably, it said news representatives could be disembedded for any reason at any time. It also included the following points: Media are not authorized use of their own vehicles while traveling in an embedded status. [U]nit commanders may impose temporary restrictions on electronic transmissions for operational security reasons. Media will seek approval to use electronic devices in a combat/hostile environment. Before the invasion in 2003, former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw saw a problem with being beholden to the military as a reporter: The idea of journalists allowing themselves to be taken under the wing of the United States military to me is very dangerous. I think journalists who agree to go with combat units effectively become hostages of the military.111
Lt. Col. Margaret H. Belknap. The CNN Effect: Strategic Enabler or Operational Risk? Parameters. p.110. 111 Cunningham and Bushell (2003). Being There.
110
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Rumsfeld, in the PAG memo, also strove to demonstrate to the press that proximity to troops was not intended to be a proxy for censorship. These ground rules recognize the right of the media to cover military operations and are in no way intended to prevent release of derogatory, embarrassing, negative, or uncomplimentary information. 112 It was a recognition, at least on paper, that the military would have to cede some control over content for a greater scope of coverage. Torie Clarkes Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs essentially said the same: [T]here will be no specific rule to govern such things as civilian deaths or friendly fire incidents. Once again, then, it seems the decision is up to the unit commander.113 Part of what Secretary Rumsfeld hoped fora reporter-soldier bond that would make embeds think hard about printing negative information about the troopscame to pass. United Press International reporter Pamela Hess made a prescient comment on the issue to TomPaine.com writer Michael Ryan: Reporters love troops. Put us with these eighteen-year-old kids and we just turn to jelly. It was a rather candid and possibly unprofessional sound bite, but nonetheless true, Ryan wrote in his response on TomPaine.com: She's right, of course; I've committed the same professional sin myself, more than once. No human with an ounce of emotion can watch young kids under fire and not respect them, fear for them, feel for them The [Bush] Administration understands this all too well."114
Rumsfeld. Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 4. 2003. Cunningham and Bushell (2003). Being There. 114 Jeanne Carstensen. Embed or In Bed? War Blog, SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle online). Mar. 25, 2003. http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/03/25/blog.DTL.
113
112
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However, Bushell and Cunninghams concern about the role of the unit commander in deciding what would be released--and even how to treat the journalists who feel compelled to report negatively about the U.S. troops as well as positively played a much larger role in limiting comprehensive coverage by individual embeds than emotional attachment to the troops ever did. The unit commanders were the officials who decided both that Brett Lieberman should be disembedded from his unit, 115 and that William Branigin should be lauded for his fair coverage of a civilian shooting.116 Differing attitudes and decisions by commanding officers only comprised one of the factors that limited embedded reportorial scope during the first months of the Iraq War. As later sections of the paper will show, operational limitations like filing embargoes and lack of mobility outside the unit narrowed the view of embedded reporters. Post-9/11 nationalism and a lack of control over editorial decisions also served to prevent the individual embedded reporter from transmitting a complete and balanced view of the war effort to news consumers.
115 116
See note 37. See note 35.
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Chapter 3: New Restrictions, New Considerations
Luck of the Draw The embedding program caused certain unforeseen blocks to the individual embedded reporters access to combat operations. Certainly the embedding agreement between the military and journalists that prevented embeds from seeing more than a small slice of the war during their assignment. One of the first stipulations in Rumsfelds February 2003 memo was that media will be embedded with unit personnel at air and ground forces bases and afloat to ensure a full understanding of all operations.117 This full understanding, as the Defense Department saw it, was not to come from the individual reporters in each of these air, land, and sea assignments, but from the aggregate of reports by embeds. Retrospectives on the embedding program by journalists also acknowledged this point.118 Nicholas Kulish, who was embedded for The Wall Street Journal with a Marine Expeditionary Force light helicopter attack squadron, said the Journal wove together coverage by embeds, from Pentagon briefing centers in Qatar and Washington and from non-embedded reporters.119 For the individual embed, however, the subject and quality of reporting from the front lines often depended on how close to the front lines his or her unit was. Part
Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Lens Crafters. The News Media & The Law. Vol. 28, no. 2. (2004). p. 21. Nobody ever suggested that the story of the war would only be told through [the embeds] inherently limited perspectives, says Katherine Skiba, Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 119 Nicholas Kulish. Embed Cred: How close is too close for embedded reporters? Washington Monthly. Dec. 1, 2003.
118 117
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of what made the story of Chris Ayres, a London Times reporter embedded with the Second Battalion, 11th Marine artillery unit, was that he did end up seeing frontline action, including incoming fire, and was deafened by the huge tank-mounted howitzer guns that fired at times for more than six straight hours. While his colleague, Janine di Giovanni, was writing that reporters were pulling out their hair with boredom in Iraqs mostly Kurdish North, Ayres unit was seeing almost constant contactthe Marines term for hostile engagement with the Iraqi military.120 Though he did not necessarily think himself so, Ayres was what other embeds would have called lucky because of his proximity to the action. On the road to Baghdad from the South, Ayres Marine unit convoy was confronted by a group of modified Iraqi trucks with machine guns on top. The trucks did not even get within shooting range before the howitzer cannon rounds turned them into charred rubble, Ayres reported. Apparently, the Iraqi fighting unit had called for backup, thoughan entire company of tanks. Having only gotten as far as Al-Diwaniyah, more than 20 kilometers south of Baghdad, Ayres elected to end his embedding two days after a squadron of American F-15 jets destroyed the oncoming tanks less than a half hour before they would have been engaged in a full-on battle with the 11th Marines, Ayres unit.121 CBS Evening News correspondent Jim Axelrod found himself in a position similar to Ayreshis Army Third Infantry unit was the first to arrive at Saddam Hussein International Airport (later renamed Baghdad International) on Apr. 4, and the first to arrive in the city of Baghdad itself during the infantrys so-called Thunder
120 121
Chris Ayres. War Reporting for Cowards. New York: Grove Press, 2005. p. 239. Ibid. pp. 238-251.
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Runs into the capital:122 What happened to me and my combat photographer Mario de Carvalho, was as much about dumb luck as anything else. We so happened to be assigned to a brigadethat was first across the berms and was the tip of the spear.123 Some of the print reporters felt that coverage may have suffered because of the Pentagon policy on single embedding slots. Television reporters and camera operators were always embedded as a pair, but print reporters were often embedded individually, without an accompanying photographer from their news organization. A few reporters felt that news agencies being forced to send one without the other was a mistake. John Koopman, a former Marine and writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, said: [The Pentagon] did a few things that were not exactly conducive to the media. For example, they assigned single slots as embedding assignments, but a newspaper needs to have a reporter-photographer team working together.124 As a result, some individual writers teamed up with photographers in nearby units and brokered deals to send pictures and copy jointly to both reporters agencies. Washington Times photographer Joe Eddins, embedded with the Marine Expeditionary Force Forward Services Support Group, collaborated with another reporter who was traveling with another Marine combat support unit in the area. We were then at Camp Viper, southeast of Nasiriyah. I would then hook up with Combat Service Support Group Eleven, where a reporter named John Bebow from the Detroit News and I had struck a deal with our foreign news desks. Because he did not have a
Vernon Loeb. Thunder Run: Revisiting the Battle for Baghdad. The Washington Post. Oct. 13, 2003. 123 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 23. 124 Ibid. p. 121.
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photographer there, and I did not have a writer, we were going to trade pictures for stories, which made both of our desks very happy.125 True to the promise of the PAG memo, there were reporters embedded with nearly every military unit deployed in the region. The Defense Department provided for a total of 920 embed slots at the outset of the program. Twenty percent of the slots were reserved for international news organizations, while 80 percent would go to U.S. domestic news media (including 10 percent to local and regional outlets).126 News organizations submitted around 775 names, but some of these included reportercamera operator pairs who filled only one slot.127 In total, 628 of the final slots were taken.128 U.S. national media (such as CBS or NBC) took the most slots, with 212, while sub-national/regional media (i.e.: The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune) took 176. International news sources (Reuters, Agence France-Presse) filled 153 slots, and foreign non-international media outlets (Al-Jazeera, Philippines TV) had 87. Twenty-seven individual news organizations had more than four embedded reporters in the field, with the highest numberaround 25going to Reuters News Service and the Associated Press.129 Almost half of the embed slots assigned, 46 percent, were with Army units; 28.1 percent embedded with Marine units. An additional 14.9 percent were placed with Navy units, 9.2 percent with the Air Force, and 1.8 percent with Special Operations. These placements ensure that about three-quarters of embed slots were
125
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 66. Cortell, Eisinger, and Althaus. Why Embed? p. 24. 127 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 208. 128 Cortell, Eisinger, and Althaus. Why Embed? DASD(PA) Bryan Whitman did not have final numbers of accepted slots on hand, but noted that the final count was approximately 600. Cortell, Althaus, and Eisinger counted the individual slots assigned for the purposes of their research, and came up with 628. 129 Ibid. Fig. 1 and 2.
126
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with troops on the ground, while the remaining 24.3 percent of reporters were placed with aerial assault units of these forces or at command hubs such as United States Central Command (CENTCOM).130 Janine Zacharia, a correspondent with the Jerusalem Post, was one of two of the papers embedded reporters in Iraqand one of the embeds assigned to a Naval air assault unit. The Post had been offered two spots for embedded print reporters by the office of the DASD (PA), Victoria Clarke. The PAG memo stipulated that while Clarke would assign a number of slots to a particular news agency, it would be up to the contact person at that news agency to decide which reporters took which assignments.131 As it turned out, her colleague was placed with ground troops, while Zacharia was embedded aboard the Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea off the island of Cyprus. There were 102 naval aviators onboardwith maintenance and ships crew rounding out the total number of people on the floating city at 5,000and absolutely no enemy fire.132 The Syrian coast is around 500 miles from Baghdad; the high-powered F/A-18 fighter jets could make the distance in no time, but there seemed to be little interest or capability from even the Iraqi-Syrian border in attacking aircraft carriers. The stories Zacharia filed before the beginning of combat operations had a mundane aspect to them, but also a very human angle because she had much more of a chance to get to know the troops on the Roosevelt in a social setting. To pass the
Cortell, Eisinger, and Althaus. Why Embed? pp. 24-25. Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 3.A.: Embed opportunities will be assigned to media organizations, not to individual reporters. The decision as to which media representative will fill assigned embed slots will be made by the designated POC (Point of Contact) for each news organization. 132 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. pp. 235-240.
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130
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time, the crew and pilots had pizza nights with non-alcoholic beer, since the ship was officially dry. They had karaoke events and ice cream socials. Zacharia wrote about the strict rules against physical contact between male and female personnel, about how the F/A-18 pilots were treated like royalty, and about watching the fighter jets come in from dummy bomb runs and landing with 400 feet of artificial runway on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Zacharia said she had no idea upon taking the embed assignment about what to expect on board the ship, let alone suspected that she would not witness any of the effects of the combat missions the F/A-18 pilots carried out. She wrote that the fighter pilots had even been scheduled to make a few pre-ground invasion bombing passes, but that the Defense Department decided against it at the last minute, limiting them to practice runs until the beginning of the ground assault. Once the actual war started, the ship shifted to this night schedule, but life changed very little for the people on board. They were putting real bombs on the planes as opposed to dummies and they were carrying out real missions. Zacharia wrote that toward the end of her 24-day embed, when she felt the stories were becoming repetitive, it was time to leave.133 Another writer embedded with an airborne unit was Los Angeles Times writer David Zucchino. Zucchino started with the Armys 101st Airborne division, but after their first missionan aerial assault at the Saddam Hussein International Airport had been scuttled because there was too high a risk that other forces hadnt taken out all of the anti-aircraft missiles around the Baghdad-based airport, he reported the unit was basically stuck guarding the gas station. It was difficult, he reported, for the officers to keep morale up among the troops, who were bored and frustrated.
133
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. pp. 235-240.
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Zucchino did not get to find out whether the unit got to fly its mission to Baghdad. He and another reporter from USA Today, Gregg Zoroya, whose satellite phone he had been using since his own was lost when his jeep flipped into a canal, spoke to another Army division, a Third Infantry unit that had been briefly sitting on the 101st air base tarmac. The unit had done the first run through Baghdad. They agreed to let Zoroya and Zucchino re-embed with the unit and ride along in the Bradley fighting vehicles to Baghdad.134 Peter Baker, a Washington Post correspondent, was one of a four-reporter crew invited to view the war from the headquarters of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Forcethe central hub known as Camp Commando for the 60,000 Marines and 26,000 British troops who would be fighting the warat an undisclosed location just outside of Iraq. It was a vantage point entirely unlike Ayres or Zacharias. Baker and the other three reporters were allowed access to the Combat Operations Center (COC) to watch satellite images of the aerial and ground campaigns as they unfolded. And, unlike Ayres and Zacharia, Baker was allowed to see much more than a narrow observable slice of the war. All of the conflicting reports from each Marine unit in the field were bottlenecked into the war room at the COC; Baker had difficulty distinguishing true reports from mistaken initial impressions as the commanders handing down orders. In fact, he said he was bombarded with too much information. The military commanders who always used to tell us that the initial reports are nearly always wrong turn out to be right. 135
134 135
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. pp. 143-145. Baker (2003). Inside View.
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Bakers experiences at the central command hub served to highlight the vast differences between military observation and censorship at home base as compared to in the field. The ground rules set out in the PAG memo stipulated that if members of the press are allowed access to sensitive information that might go beyond the scope of what might be included in a briefing or debriefing, the military commanders reserve the right to conduct a security review of any article the press representatives plan to file. In other words, access to sensitive information would be countered by a World War II-style system of submission to a censor.136 Admittance to the COC fell under this provision, but the public affairs officers comfort with the policy of why not release? described by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in the PAG memo, had a rocky start, Baker reported.137 The morning the war startedjust hours after we had been reassured the beginning of the conflict was still at least a day awaywe felt misled. A nasty shouting match ensued with the chief public affairs officer, who offered to throw us out if we were so dissatisfied. Shortly after their argument, though, Baker said both the team of reporters and the Marine commanders made concessions. The four reporters were offered access to the top-secret COC inside the expeditionary forces headquarters which was moved inside Iraqs borders shortly after combat operations beganon the condition that they submit stories to a security review. Baker said that he was initially leery, but that the experience was unexpectedly positive. A high-ranking Marine strategist, or the PAO, would read the stories and prune sensitive information, but it turned out that very few information
Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 6.A.1. Ibid. Sec. 3.Q. The standard for release of information should be to ask why not release [versus] why release. Decisions should be made ASAP, preferably in minutes, not hours.
137 136
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embargoes were necessary. They might ask that we take out a particular location of a unit or delete a radio call sign that they wanted to keep secret, but they were incredibly professional and made no substantive changes to the files we sent in. 138 A placement at a major command post did not necessarily come with the same kind of information surfeit experienced by Baker. New York Magazine media critic Michael Wolff was based at the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) outpost in Doha, Qatar during the invasion. The profoundly interesting thing about Doha is that nothing happened, Wolff said. I have never been in a situation where there were so many reporters so far from anything that was happening.139 The way Wolff describes it, an embed slot at CENTCOM was not unlike the pool system during the first Gulf Warreporters would get up in the morning, attend press briefings, and file stories based on those briefings. For an average reporter, he imagined, the assignment could be tedious and terrible. For a press critic, however, he said that he saw things somewhat differently: I had an unfair advantage in that I was not there in Doha covering the war. I had a certain amount of cover, and my cover was uncovering the media. I was able to talk about things that they were really not in the purview of so many other reporters to talk about. Despite the fact that nothing happened, Wolff said he was happy with his embed slot, for reasons that differed quite a bit from many straight-on war reporters. He imagined that an embed slot on the front lines with a mechanized or infantry division would be claustrophobic,
138 139
Baker (2003). Inside View. Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 40.
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trapping the reporter inside a Bradley fighting vehicle or tank for long periods of time. 140 Outside of the COC or CENTCOM, individual embeds found that the degree of control imposed varied wildlyfrom tight and suspicious to none at all. Often, reporters closer to the front lines experienced looseror nocontrol, as opposed to those who were further away from the center of the action.141 To the credit of the military establishment, access was not outright denied to those reporters who rarely or never saw public affairs officials, a tenet of the program which was stipulated in the PAG memo.142 As the Pentagon had little or no control over press access outside of the hypotheticals detailed in the memo, though, some embeds found the commanders and public affairs officers in their units more permissive than did others. Often, consistency of access and censorship depended on the proximity of the public affairs officer to the reporter in question. That is to say, the less often that a PAO was available in the unit to mediate between commanding officer and embedded reporter, the more likely it was that reporters were subject to the caprice of the commanding officer. Washington Post reporter Lyndsey Layton, who was stationed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf, was required to give every interview in the presence of a Navy minder. The officer noted every one of her questions and each of her subjects replies. She was also banned from the general mess deck, preventing
140
141
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. pp. 40-43. Ibid. p. 191. There was no apparent PAO watching over my shoulder to see what I said. I just talked about what I saw, and what I heard, and what was happening around me. I did a lot of interviews with Marines, and asked them whatever I felt like asking them. It was wonderful to be able to have the freedom to do that daily. 142 Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 3.F. [T]he absence of a PA escort is not a reason to preclude media access to operations.
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casual interaction with sailors. After five days, Layton complained to Navy headquarters in the tiny Persian Gulf island country of Bahrain, managing to get the commanding officer onboard to ease the constant monitoring. Even still, when one of the Abraham Lincolns FA-18 Hornet jets was lost over Iraq, the first reporters notified were those at CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar, not the journalists aboard the Lincoln.143 Despite the Navy officers attempts to limit Laytons reported content, San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman argues that it was not physically possible to entirely control the information coming from embedded reporters.144 Col. Guy Shields, a public affairs officer for the Army, concurs: There was absolutely no way to place any spin control. The media were right there. They were reporting.145 Whether there was anything to report depended in large part on which unit reporters were placed with, andas many journalists assigned to units on the ground, the attitude of the unit commander toward press representatives. With a lenient and forthcoming unit commander, reporters had incredible freedomat least in terms of access to the activities of the unit and the opinions of the troops therein. Thus, Rick Levanthal, a Fox News reporters who had a very accommodating commander and an open unit, said: There was no apparent PAO watching over my shoulder to see what I said. I just talked about what I saw, and what I heard, and what was happening around me. I did a lot of interviews with Marines, and asked them whatever I felt like
Jack Shafer. Embeds and Unilaterals: The press dun good in Iraq. But they could have dun better. May 1, 2003. http://www.slate.com/id/2082412/. When they boarded the ship, Rear Adm. John M. Kelly forced them to agree to ground rules that were more restrictive than the Pentagon-imposed rules. 144 Carstensen (2003). Embed or In Bed? 145 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 75.
143
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asking them. It was wonderful to be able to have the freedom to do that daily.146 Geoffrey Mohan of the Los Angeles Times similarly reported never having even seen a PAO during his embedment, even joking with fellow reporters that the PAOs didnt want to be as close to the front lines as he was, with the Army Third Infantry Divisions Second Brigade.147 The Washington Posts William Branigin was with the Armys Third Infantry Division when soldiers failed to heed an officers command to fire warning shots at a speeding civilian vehicle at a checkpoint. The brigade had been forced to open fire with a 25 mm cannon. Ten of the Land Rovers fifteen civilian passengers, including five children, were killed. According to Branigin, the divisions captain, Ronny Johnson, yelled over the radio to the soldiers who had shot up the van, You just [expletive] killed a family because you didnt fire a warning shot soon enough!148 Branigin reported exactly what he saw, despite Pentagon reports to the contrary. The only comment I got from the battalion commander was, I read your story. That was all he said.149 Covering military mistakes could be a harrowing experience for those journalists, like Joe Eddins of The Washington Times whose unit commanders were more hostile to press presence. Eddins documented the drowning of four Marines that had tried to cross the Saddam Hussein Canal in full uniform and without a safety line. When Eddins began taking pictures of the recovery operation in the canal, his point of contact, Capt. Kevin Coughlin, ordered Eddins back into the Humvee. When they
146
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq.. p. 191. Ibid. p. 262. 148 William Branigin. A Gruesome Scene on Hwy. 9: Ten Dead After Vehicle Shelled at Checkpoint. The Washington Post. Apr. 1, 2003. 149 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 234.
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returned to base camp after the incident, Eddins phoned his bureau chief and told them what had happened. He told the Times he had pictures, though he said he would respect the requirement that reporters wait to identify wounded or killed soldiers until next of kin could be notified. Nevertheless, the papers Pentagon affairs reporter began to call the Defense Department, asking questions about the incident. Later, Captain Coughlin approached Eddins with the story that the Times had run. He told Eddins that he had been advised by the command center not to talk to him or to let anyone else speak to him, either. It was clear, Eddins said, that he was being blackballed. After the fall of Baghdad, when the suspicious commander released Eddins from the unit, he took up with a battalion of Marine combat troops who let him take pictures of whatever he chose.150 Ordinary soldiers were much more disposed to appreciating the work of the embeds than were the commanding officers. Brett Lieberman, who was ejected from his embed slot with a Marine unit over reports of strained supply lines and understaffed humanitarian missions, said that the low-ranking Marine grunts were upset that he had been forced to leave the unit. They kept saying things about freedom of the press. They thought it was bogus. 151 Lieberman ended up being back in Kuwait along with Geraldo Rivera. Rivera was a former correspondent for Fox News who was being disembedded from the Armys 101st Airborne Division for drawing a map of the area the troops were occupying while broadcasting live.152
150
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. pp. 68-71. Ibid. pp. 317-320. 152 Chris Plante. Military kicks Geraldo out of Iraq. CNN.com. Mar. 31, 2003. http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/31/sprj.irq.geraldo/.
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A couple of reporters found themselves either granted more access or denied it because of their affiliation with a particular news organization, though by and large this was not the rule. Rick Levanthal, also of Fox News, found the attitude of the Second Battalion, 23rd Marines to be particularly welcoming because of the stations reputation for on-air support of the war effort and of the troops. Of course, network affiliation was not a guarantee of free rein, as demonstrated by Riveras actions, but many young soldiers told Levanthal they identified with the tone of coverage embraced by Fox. For instance, the network used Operation Iraqi Freedomthe U.S. governments name for the conflict, and used an American flag as a backdrop for reports by correspondents and for footage of the troops in action, journalist Jacqueline E. Sharkey said. Fox anchors and correspondents expressed their views about many aspects of the conflict. One anchor reporting on the search for Saddam Hussein asked, Did we get him? Commentators made disparaging remarks about guests and news organizations that raised questions about the conflict.153 This reputation did not bother Levanthal. Id rather have [U.S. soldiers] like us than dislike us. I mean, if I have a choice of being with a network they didnt want around versus a network that they did, I think Id choose being with a network they did want because were going to get better access.154 Correspondent Mercedes Gallego, who filed both for the Bilbao (Spain)-based newspaper El Correo and Telecincoa news station based in the Basque region of the countrysaid that the soldiers in her unit, the First Marine Battalion, Headquarters Unit, were just generally intolerant of any statement they perceived as
Jacqueline E. Sharkey. The Television War. American Journalism Review. May 2003. http://ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2988. 154 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 192.
153
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being liberal. That was the key word for [the Marines]. A liberal was like a demon.155 News organizations with a reputationeither perceived or realof being hostile to the American war effort, sometimes saw their embedded reporters denied access to critical briefings. Amr El-Kakhy, a reporter for the Arabic-language news service Al-Jazeera, he said was denied access to a briefing due to his network affiliation. He and his cameraman were excluded from a briefing on future operations, he said, while reporters from Reuters, the Associated Press, and CNN were allowed into the briefing room. When he asked duty officer why he was excluded from the meeting, the soldier told El-Kakhy that the unit colonel excluded him because of the stations reputation.156 Al-Jazeera did become known from the first days of the war for its willingness to show footage of casualtieseven shots of American wounded and dead that the U.S. networks declined to show, even after the 72-hour embargo period on releasing the identities of slain soldiers was over. According to a study of TV broadcasts during the first few weeks of the war, Al-Jazeera aired more stories about Iraqi civilian casualties and war protests than the three domestic U.S. news networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), as well as CNN and Fox News Channel.157 Al Jazeeras former spokesmannow communications director for the Dubai-based and Saudi-owned TV channel Al-ArabiyaJihad Ali Ballout, told National Public Radio that television
155
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 88. Ibid. p. 182. 157 Aday, Livingston, and Hebert (2005). Embedding the Truth. pp. 13-14. pp 13, 14. Much of AlJazeeras critical coverage revolved around stories about civilian casualties. Also, Table 2: 4.5 percent of Al-Jazeera stories centered on civilian casualties, compared to 4.4 percent for ABC, 4.6 percent for NBC, 3.1 percent for CBS, and, 0.6 percent for Fox News. For the purposes of the study, CNN viewing was divided into two evening prime-time slots5:00-5:30 (3.4 percent), and 6:00 to 6:30 (1.4 percent).
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would be deceiving its audience were it to censor any of the information that actually makes people aware of all aspects. 158 All in all, although the network aired more stories (10.6 percent) that were critical of military actions in Iraq than all of the other surveyed networks combined, the study says about 89 percent of news spots aired on Al-Jazeera were neutral in tone.159 Regardless of network or newspaper affiliation, some reporters who enjoyed national name recognition tendedas they always haveto get better access and greater mobility because of that star power. The most prominent example, one noted by several reporters, was that of ABC News Ted Koppel, an anchor for the popular Nightline evening news program. Koppel was embedded with a unit of the Armys Third Infantry Division, but by virtue of his famous name, some reporters said, he could essentially hitch a ride with any departing unit to get closer to the action. Fellow Nightline correspondent Mike Cerre said that attendant to Koppels relative fame was the opportunity to see the big picture of the war, rather than just the narrow slice afforded less well-known reporters. 160 The effect of Koppels star power was not lost on Jim Axelrod, who worked with Nightline rival program CBS Evening News: Ted Koppel was also with the Third Infantry. He had the run of the joint. The Third Infantry is divided into three combat brigades, so Koppel could sit at infantry headquarters and say, Hey, you know the Second
Sharkey (2003). The Television War. Aday, Livingston, and Hebert (2005). Embedding the Truth. Table 3: CBS and Fox News aired no critical stories during the sample time period (1,820 stories total from Mar. 20 to Apr. 20, 2003); 2.2 percent of ABC stories were critical of military actions, 1 percent of NBCs, and 3.9 percent of CNNs stories (between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m.) were critical in tone. Only 0.2 percent of Al-Jazeera stories were supportive of the war effort. 160 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 98. [Koppel] had more access to helicopters and vehicles to move around and see things. He could report on the grand scheme of things.
159 158
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Brigade seems to be taking on some good fighting for the next forty-eight hours. Lets go with them. I was stapled to the First Brigade combat team.161
Practical Limitations As embedding as a policy came into full force in the Iraq War, a number of on-theground practical limitations to coverage confronted reporters. Though some were due to the limits of technology or of circumstance, many others were unique to the Iraq conflict simply because of the structure of the embedding program. Many journalists found that despite the absence of a PAO or other potentially censoring human force, circumstances such as mode of transportation, the speed at which the unit moved even the weatherbecame an impromptu censor. Some embeds literally saw a small slice of the warat least while within the confines of a Bradley armored vehicle and its almost medievally small slit-like viewing windows. David Zucchino wrote: Riding around in a Bradley is very claustrophobic and confusing it was incredibly loud, hot, stifling; theres just no air inside and your only view is through these little glass vision blocks that are maybe three inches high and six, seven, eight inches wide. Its a prison in there. Its hard to see whats going on with all the smoke and the craziness and speed.162 One of the more frustrating aspects of moving quickly toward the capital, many journalists said, was the inability to stop and assess the situation on the ground, or get an idea of the effect the troops movements were having on the surrounding
161 162
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 24. Ibid. p. 143.
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villages on the road to Baghdad. Good journalism involves thinking, observing, and looking around, according to a communication scholar who insists that the luxury to stop and think, to observe comprehensively, was denied when military units moved too fast to allow reporters to gather the proper context..163 Newsday reporter Graham Rayman, embedded with the Eighth Marine Corps Engineers, expressed frustration about the unrelenting pace of the missions: I wish we could just stop for a minute, and I could ask around, but that was one of the bad things about the embedding process because you couldnt do that. You were forced to be swept along with the unit.164 Since the PAG memo specifically bars journalists from traveling in civilian vehicles while they are embedded, there is no way to return to a village the unit has passed or to cross back over the border if the unit has returned to base camp outside Iraq.165 There were reporters I knew who were upset because they couldnt get [military] transportation to go talk to other people about what was happening, Dallas Morning News columnist Jim Landers said. The commanding officers wanted us to let them know where we were, if we left the unit. It just didnt seem that it was worth it to move about.166 Embeds saw the ordnance that their units fired at unknown enemy targets. They heard the relentless pounding of the guns and saw the mortars explode in flashes
Katherine Skiba. Journalists embodied realities of Iraq war. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Sept. 14, 2003. 164 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 309. 165 Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 2.C.1. Embedded media are not authorized use of their own vehicles while traveling in an embedded status. 166 Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting from the Front. p. 115.
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of light on the horizon.167 What was less visibleand sometimes invisiblewas the effect of the U.S.-led coalitions assault on the surrounding Iraqi countryside. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that examined 40.5 hours of embedded coverage by five cable and network news channels found that about half of the reports from embedded journalists showed combat action, but none of the stories surveyed depicted people hit by weapons.168 That is the problem with a high-tech war, said Peter Baker of the Washington Post. In some ways it may seem more bloodless than it really is. In the end we saw a flash on the screen. We didnt see a broken body or the incinerated corpse.169 Units relative detachment from their targets also provided military commanders with a convenient excuse to prevent embeds from covering Iraqi civilian casualties. Ron Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who was embedded with the Seventh Marine Division, said that one of the unit officers once forbade him to investigate the wreckage of a car on which the unit had opened fire a short time before. A sergeant major specifically told us that if we went to look, he would leave us at the site.170 Limited movement and restrictive commanding officers were some of the reasons approximately 1,200 reporters opted out of the embedding program and decided to pursue stories outside of the purview of the militarys ground rules. The Pentagon only imposed ground rules and a limited number of slots on embedded
167
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 196. [P]eople are yelling gas-gas-gas over the radio, the Marines are scrambling around trying to get their own guns set up so they can return fire, the huge oil well is burning in the distance. 168 Sharkey (2003). The Television War. 169 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 291. 170 Jennifer LaFleur. Embed program worked, broader war coverage lagged. The News Media & the Law. Vol. 27, no. 2. (Spring 2003) p. 4.
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reporters; non-embedded journalistsor unilateralswere much more like the reporters in Vietnam, who, with proper visa documentation, could come and go from the country as they pleased and travel where the wanted. Mohammed Fahmy, a translator and driver for reporter Mark Magnier and photographer Brian Walski of the Los Angeles Times, said his charges harbored a fierce pride in being unilateral rather than embedded: [Magnier, Walski, and I] had more freedom. We got more humanitarian stories. We were able to go to the families houses. The embedded journalists were just covering the army and how the war was going on.171 However, a number of military spokespeople and journalists said that some of the unilaterals pride evaporated after having been witness to combat situations.172 Unilaterals, unlike embeds, were allowed to use civilian vehicles to travel the country. However, Pentagon policy guidelines said that non-embedded media vehicles were not allowed to join military convoys.173 Even though many large news organizations spent a great deal of money outfitting their civilian vehicles with the same paint jobs and markings as military Humvees in order to avoid being mistaken for Iraqi resistance fighters, they would still attempt to take cover with the fighting units during skirmishes. Some were allowed to follow the convoys, while others were turned away and forced to retreat because commanders did not want to be responsible
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 242. Skiba (2003). Journalists embodied realities of Iraq war. [N]o military bosses had fond memories of the estimated 1,200 unilaterals in the war zone, since more often than not, they turned to the military when they found themselves under fire and needed to be rescued. 173 Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting from the Front. pp 58-59. I can tell you from reading some of the reports from commanders on the ground and some of the public affairs officers who were managing the embeds for their units, even though we had guidelines out there that said no media vehicles, I can tell you that the media had vehicles that they took with them regardless of what our guidance from on high was. We definitely didnt condone itactually strongly didnt condone itand told the different commands not to have media vehicles.
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for the lives of reporters not embedded with their units.174 The European Broadcasting Union even reported that British and U.S. forces in southern Iraq sometimes detained unilaterals or sent them out of the country for going unescorted into the war zone.175 The advantage of safety was definitely on the side of the embeds in the conflict, though along with that guarantee came limits on access to possible stories.176 (The advantage of increased protection did not guarantee a reporters safe return. Nine embedded and unilateral journalists were killed in March and April of 2003, including ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd (unilateral)who may have been the victim of U.S. friendly fireAl-Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayyoub (unilateral), and Christian Liebig (embedded) of Germanys Focus magazine. Photographer Taras Protsyuk (unilateral) was killed in a friendly-fire attack on Baghdads Palestine Hotel, and the Atlantic Monthlys Michael Kelly (embedded) was killed in a car accident south of the Baghdad airport.177) Even unilaterals who informally joined convoys for protection saw their flexibility to cover events diminished. James Hill, a contracted
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 393. Eventually the whole convoy stopped because the commander wanted to find out who these guys were who came along without their permissionthe commanding officer comes over and says, You cant stay with our convoy. You have to leave at first light. If you try to follow us, then well He just trailed off. 175 EBU protests against reporting restrictions in southern Iraq. European Broadcasting Union. Apr. 2, 2003. www.ebu.ch/news/press_archive/press_info_22003_63_irak.php. US Central Command policy is now actively restricting independent newsgathering from Southern Iraq, EBU Secretary General Jean Stock said in a statement. Reporters and camera crews who put their lives at risk have been detained by American and British troops and returned to Kuwait. Mr. Stock said that this treatment appeared to be aimed in particular at organizations from countries which had chosen not to participate in the American-led coalition. As a result journalists are now exposed to a much greater risk and the coalition policy targets the quality of their reporting, he said. 176 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. pp. 73-78. There was one young rookie photographer As I was walking by, he asked, Sir, can I talk to you? My editors have ordered me across the border tomorrow. What do I do? I said, Shit, dont go! He said, Its my job. I got to go. Also: pp. 1-10. The unilateralsa lot of them lost their cojones when they got up there. They wanted to be unilateral; they wanted to run around and have the freedom of unilaterals until they got into Baghdad, and then they jumped in [with the troops]. 177 Journalists Killed in 2003. Iraq: Journalists in Danger. Committee to Protect Journalists. http://www.cpj.org/deadly/2003_list.html#iraq.
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freelance photographer for The New York Times, was technically not embedded, but he joined a Marine unitin which he was allowed to ride in his own Jeepthree days after the official start of military operations. Hill was not injured while working as a unilateral, but noted that his options for independent excursions narrowed once he informally agreed to military protection by joining up with the unit. 178 New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg declined an embed slot, and instead chose a unilateral position because he believed that the slot offered him would not allow him to see anything of consequence. The real danger is not being killed, but being seriously out of position. 179 This mispositioning often resulted in reports from embeds with one branch of the military conflicting with those from another branch, said Mark Seibel, who worked as international managing editor at Knight Ridder news services Washington Bureau during the initial incursion into Iraq, said that reporters embedded with different branches of the military often reported different things. The Marine reporter would be saying one thing, and the Army reporter would say another.180 Receiving conflicted reports from journalists in the field did not necessarily mean that the reports were wrong. Both the Army and the Marine Corps afteroperations assessments noted that embeds had provided the most accurate coverage of operations, at least on the battlefield.181 Embeds seemed to have a line in on
178
Lori Robertson. Images of War. American Journalism Review. October/November 2004. http:ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=3759. If youre in a convoy, youre not saying, Hey, thats a good picture. Lets stop and take it. 179 Shafer (2003). Embeds and Unilaterals. 180 Lens Crafters. (2004). 181 Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom. pp. 45-50. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2003/3id-aar-jul03.pdf. First Marine Division Operation Iraqi Freedom: Lessons Learned. pp. 33-35. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/oiflessons-learned.htm.
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accurate battle reports that journalists working from the U.S. at the Pentagon or at CENTCOM did not have. When an enormous sandstorm enveloped Army troops around the Iraqi city of Najaf, only the embedded reporters knewdue to pre-war briefingsthat the division planned to stop around that point to refit and refuel. Media outside Iraq immediately began suggesting a quagmire and flawed plan, the Armys Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action report stated.182 Jim Crawley, a reporter embedded with a nearby Marine unit, confirmed the operational pause, with his paper, the San Diego Union Tribune, because his unit was also stopped at the time to allow the Army supply and fuel trucks to use the roads.183 This is not to say that all of the reports emerging from embedded reporters in the field were accurate, either. Embeds were subject to spin from the military commanders in their unitsand without a way to independently investigate the effects of the units actions, officers accounts had to serve as verification. Todd Morman of the Independent Weekly wrote, Embedded journalists skilled as they may be, have very little to work with aside from the data immediately in front of them or what theyre spoon-fed from nearby officials. 184 For instance, journalists said the southern city of Basra, under siege by British troops, was taken on March 23, when in fact it took the coalition forces until two weeks after that date to subdue resistance.185
Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report. p. 48. (2003). Lens Crafters. (2004). 184 Todd Morman. In bed with the embeds: Local journalists court dangerand military brasswith Pentagon-approved war reporting. Independent Weekly. Apr. 2, 2003. http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A19278. Also see: Tough Battle for Umm Qasr. BBC News. Mar. 21, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2873311.stm. Marines securing Iraqi port city. CNN Online. Mar. 22, 2003. http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/21/sprj.irq.southern.iraq/index.html. 185 Smith (2003). The Real-Time War: Defining News in the Middle East.
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National Public Radios John Burnett himself told of seeing firsthand just how official reports given to embeds may differ from the actual situation on the ground. A week after the fall of Baghdad, he disembedded himself and hired a driver and translator to investigate the effects of a 500-pound precision-guided bomb on the village of Taniya, southeast of Baghdad. The after-mission reports had said that only tanks and tracked vehicles in the area had been destroyed, while Taniya residents told Burnett that 31 civilians had been killed in their beds by the bombing.186 Burnetts experience served to demonstrate the military-created insulation from the larger picture that surrounded embedded reporters. Ironically, the effects of this insulation were most noticeable in connection with the flood of cutting-edge technology that reporters had at their disposal in order to cover the war. Even with real-time satellite television uplinks, satellite phones, e-mail filing, and portable lipstick cameras that could be mounted on the helmet of a soldier charging into battle, the structure of the embedding program put unforeseen limits on the use of technology that further precluded full coverage of the war. As was the case with mobility, use of technology was often sacrificed to the cause of operational security. Per the PAG memo, embedded reporters were promised transportation of their communication gear.187 This meant that the portable satellite dishes, cameras, tripods, laptops, battery packs, and backup cameras were all welcome. However, at least in the case of the embedded reporters and those unilaterals who chose to take up with convoys, equipment had to be both packed and
186
John Burnett. Embedded/Unembedded II (Dispatches: slices of the war). Columbia Journalism Review. May/June 2003. pp. 43-44. 187 Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 2.C.3.: Units should plan lift and logistical support to assist in moving media products to and from the battlefield so as to tell our story in a timely manner.
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unloaded at the pace at which the military unit moved. News crews traveled fast, but they did not travel light.188 In the case that reporters could not transmit using their own equipment, the PAG memo stated that military communication equipment could be used, as long as filing stories did not interfere with critical communications.189 The rules also stipulated, though, that a ban on electronic equipment use or transmission could be put into effect by unit commanders in order to avoid compromising operational security and tactical surprise.190 Several embedded journalists told of having experienced frustrating filing delays and even a limit on the use of flashlights, non-uplinked laptops, or even reflective clothing in the interests of stealth.191 When we opened our laptops and tried to write stories at night, the gunnery sergeant would bellow, Turn that fucking light out before you get your [head] shot! reported NPRs Burnett in the Columbia Journalism Review.192 Even during hours in which the communication ban was lifted, Boston Herald reporter Jules Crittenden said, simple logistics often got in the way of being able to sit down and file a storyby laptop, phone, or otherwise. Crittenden wrote that his satellite phone got no reception through the thick walls of the Bradley Fighting
Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting from the Front. p. 212. Rumsfeld (2003). Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 2.C.3.: In the event of commercial communications difficulties, media are authorized to file stories via expeditious military signal/communications capabilities. 190 Ibid. Sec. 2.C.4.: [U]nit commanders may impose temporary restrictions on electronic transmissions for operational security reasons. Media will seek approval to use electronic devices in a combat/hostile environment, unless otherwise directed by the unit commander or his/her designated representative. 191 Ayres (2005). War Reporting for Cowards. 192 Burnett (2003). Embedded/unembedded II (Dispatches: slices of the war).
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Vehicle in which he was traveling, and that the refueling and rest stops were completely consumed by eating, stretching, and entrenching impromptu toilets.193 A number of journalists lost use of their satellite phones because of a security snafu in the early days of the incursion. Phones manufactured by the United Arab Emirates-based satellite communication company Thuraya integrated a satellite-based global positioning feature. The military had received intelligence that some of the GPS codes had been sold to the Iraqis, and that they could use the phones to track the position of troops via the embedded reporter using the Thuraya phone. All handsets of that make were confiscated, leaving some of the journalists who used exclusively that brand in the lurch.194 CNN correspondent Martin Savidge said that his news organization had had the foresight to outfit its reporters with three brands of satellite phone as well as old-fashioned videophones. Despite this seeming technological advantage, Savidge said that the First Battalion Marine units restrictions on when and where he could film often clashed with the mission of his 24-hour news network.195 Since the TV crew could only work in daylight for fear of Iraqi troops seeing the lights from cameras and monitors at night, Savidge said that his team often could not put together comprehensive, planned, and pre-written segments on the wars progress, but were limited to a blow-by-blow account of the units operations as they unfolded. [W]hat you ended up with was just an of-the-moment what the unit was doing, Savidge said. What I thought was lacking in the coverage was that sort
193
Jules Crittenden. Embedded Journal: overnight Bradley toward Baghdad. Poynter Online. Mar. 23, 2003. http://www.poynter.org/dg.lts/id.26369/content.content_view.htm. 194 Tony Pugh. Military officials ban use of phones with GPS technology. Knight Ridder News Service. Apr. 1, 2003. 195 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 274. I work for a twentyfour-hour news network. The emphasis of our network is LIVE, LIVE, LIVEas much live as possible [but] we were working under a number of restrictions in Iraq.
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of depth, putting it into perspective and adding the fabric of the story.196 Savidges complaintespecially as a television reporterwas echoed by former embeds and media scholars alike, and reflects on the larger context of the war as it was received by the viewing American public. Some journalists believe technology led television to focus on images instead of information.197 There emerged an even more fierce debate over the type of images that were shown, even as early as the first days of the war. Many of the embedded reporters came to realize that their embed slots afforded them long periods of drudgery and confinement, punctuated by brief moments of utter terror. When not engaged in a firefight, London Times reporter Chris Ayres said that the commander briefing the press corps in Kuwait had been right in his assessment that the campaign would be like the worst camping trip of your life.198 The reporters slept in ditches, crammed in vehicles, and behind the treads of huge tanks in the freezing desert night, ready to move at a moments notice. They ate calorie-laden packaged meals, dug trenches for toilets, and had sand ground into the keyboards of their laptops, their clothes, even the creases of their hands because of blinding sandstorms. These sandstorms disabled a number of military units and their embeds on the road to Baghdad in March 2003. Television reporter Dean Staley of the ABC News affiliate KSTP-TV in Minneapolis/St. Paul, who was embedded with another battalion of the Armys 101st Airborne, told of the relentless storms that lashed the unit and kept its Black Hawk helicopters grounded. Adverse weather conditions did little to stifle the creativity of the reporter, though, Staley said. He filed a couple of stories on the storms
196
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 274. Sharkey (2003). The Television War. 198 Ayres (2005). War Reporting for Cowards. p. 151.
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themselves, which aired on the Weather Channel, including one about the efforts to locate a patrol that went missing. It turned out they had been lost only about half a mile from base camp but couldnt establish contact in the storm.199
199
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. pp. 137-138.
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Chapter 4: Obstacles to Objectivity
Some caution and clarification is needed to proceed with the argument that objectivity by embedded reporters was threatened during the first several exhilarating weeks of the military incursion into Iraq. For the purposes of this paper, objectivity will be defined here as the ability of the individual reporter to recognize the presence of emotional ties to their subjects, propaganda on the part of the government, bias by their news organizations, and/or their own limited view of the war, and compensate to the best of her ability. One of the greatest fears in the journalistic community about the embedding program before its inception was that the American news media would end up in bed with the military, happily going along with the official account of the wars progress as the publicity branch.200 On the whole, though, journalists disagree over whether embedded reporters ended up entirely beholden toand cowed bymilitary information and military might.201 Still, a number of reporter accounts and studies of
Bliss (2003). The Press Goes to War. The sagacity of [embedding] is that it is based on the basic tenet of PR: Its all about relationships. The better the relationship with a journalist, the better the chance that journalist will pick up and report [a desired] message, she says. So now journalists were making dozensif not hundredsof new friends among the armed forces. And, if the bosses of their newfound buddies wanted to get a key message or two across about how sensitive the U.S. is being to humanitarian needs or how humanely they are treating Iraqis, what better way than through these embedded journalists? As a result, mostif not allof the stories being filed contained key messages the Department of Defense wanted to communicate. 201 Todd Gitlin. Embed or In Bed? The war, the media, and the truth. The American Prospect Online. May 31, 2003. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=embed_or_in_bed. [I]n truth, many of these accusations were misplaced. Embedded reporters did reasonably well under what were surely confining circumstances. If most of the reporting was travelogue--desert expanses, puffs of smoke and occasional bang-bang, culminating in moments of toppled Saddam Hussein statuary--this was no fault of the embeds. They saw what they saw and couldn't see what they couldn't see. Also: Zoe Heller. Embedded reporters are far too close to the action. The Age. Apr. 1, 2003. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/31/1048962698037.html. [T]he real problem, in the American media at least, is the blatant and unembarrassed manner in which the reporters have become mouthpieces for the military. There was always a worry that close proximity to the American forces
200
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(mainly broadcast) news reports from embedded journalists substantiate the idea that, at least in some respects, the intimacy of embedment precluded keeping a clear eye and a level head about coverage. Anna Badhken of the San Francisco Chronicle said that one thing she fears about embedding is that it will become the only way for reporters to cover a war, which will inherently bias journalists toward the subjects they cover. [I]t is hard for a reporter, any reporter, to be critical of people he or she travels with and shares his or her daily meals. In a war zone, your travel companion becomes your closest friend; can we be totally unbiased when our friends have accidentally shot a bunch of civilians in a bus and we have to cover the story?202 While many news stories focused on the sometimes fatal errors of judgment by military personnel, the cumulative effect of traveling, eating, sleeping and commiserating with troops blurred the line of professionalism between source/soldier, and friend in at least a few instances.203 Bonding may have taken place, acknowledged U.S. Army Public Affairs Officer Col. Guy Shields. A 2006 study of 48 stories by six individual embedded print journalists showed that the tone of coverage overwhelmingly positive in reference to the daily lives and habits of the soldiers, and openly admiring of laudable traits like courage, optimism, and
would make objectivity a little tricky. But even so, its been shocking to see how swift and complete the process of going native has been. 202 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 19. 203 Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting From the Front. pp. 212-213. Objectivity was feared to be the first casualty of war. In fact, the majority of the embeds said that they could not maintain objectivity. They were, after all, eating, sleeping, ridingand in a couple of cases dyingwith the soldiers they were accompanying. Soldiers werent subjects in the sense that the journalists interviewed them and then never saw them again.
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resilience.204 In only a couple of instances, though, did individual reporters say that their own objectivity was compromised.205 More often, journalists said that they had to be careful about how they framed their relationships with the soldiers in print or during a broadcast in order to refrain from seeming compromised.206 To this end, CNN senior editors warned their embedded reporters not to refer to the troops collectively as werather the more impersonal they.207 The effects of this policy were documented in an analysis of self-references instances of I and wein live battlefield coverage by embedded television network correspondents over the course of 16 broadcast hours on CNN from March 22 to March 25, 2003. Park and Fox demonstrated that embedded correspondents referred to themselves significantly more often during the course of a stand-up segment than did non-embedded reporters. [Non-embedded] reporters referred to themselves on average once per story, Fox and Park write. This might be expected of a reporter in the field to establish his or her location, or in direct response to a question from the news anchor, but the repeated use of I by embedded reporters in
204
Mark Slagle. Now to War: A Textual Analysis of Embedded Print Reporters in the Second Iraq War. Masters thesis submission, The University of Missouri, Columbia. August 2006. http://edt.missouri.edu/Summer2006/Thesis/SlagleM-072406-T5655/research.pdf. p. 87. The stories written by the embedded print reporters in this study displayed subtle but frequent examples of promilitary biasThis trend was apparent from the earliest articles studied, but became more pronounced as the war progressedThis suggeststhat the journalists had undergone a bonding process with the soldiers and marines they covered. 205 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 53. Well, I couldnt look anybody in the eye and say, Hey, Im being completely objective, because I liked and respected these guys. I called them my Marines. Also: Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting From the Front. p. 112. Regardless of what any embedded reporter says, it was impossible not to lose some of your objectivity. These were the men and women who were feeding you, protecting you, and befriending you. 206 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 87. Youve got to be careful what you say or write. You cant be too much on the side of the Marines, because [readers] will question your objectivity as a journalist. 207 Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting from the Front. p. 68. Bruce Conover, senior international editor for CNN in Atlanta, said that the policy was to instruct embeds to use the word they rather than we to describe troop actions, especially in live reports when stress was highest.
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their stories indicates that they not only established themselves in the field but placed themselves in the story itself.208 Conversely, though, the authors found that the networks non-embedded reporterswho had not received the same caution about the use of collective personal pronounsmore often used the we in reference to the troops and reporters as a whole than did CNN embeds.209 Among the accounts of the embedded experience surveyed for this paper, far more reporters expressed concerns with the ethical dilemmas of living as a soldieralbeit unarmedwhile embedded with a fighting unit than expressed doubt about their ability to effectively cover the events they observed. One of the ambiguities faced by embedded reportersthough largely seen by these reporters as ethically non-threateningwas the use of their communication equipment by the soldiers in their units. Nicholas Kulish of The Wall Street Journal told of his e-mail inbox being flooded with greetings from friends and family for Marines after the unit had imposed a communication cut-off shortly before the beginning of the invasion in March 2003: [T]he messages I received were rarely about the stories Instead it was personal. Is my husband okay? Say hello to Bob. Can you tell me how hes doing? Is everyone safe? Please give him a hug for me. I wasnt sure what would have happened if Id tried to give a macho Cobra helicopter pilot a hug, so I didnt follow through on that one, but a lot of the other messages were answered and greetings passed on. I sometimes felt like the squadrons designated Red Cross representative.210
Fox and Park (2006). The I of Embedded reporting: An Analysis of CNN Coverage of the Shock and Awe Campaign. p. 45. 209 Ibid. p. 47. 210 Kulish (2003). Embed Cred: How Close is too Close for Embedded reporters?
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Gerry Barker and Chris Kelley, editors at Belo Interactive Mediawhich administers a number of local television station-affiliated Web sites nationwidesaid that a project set up by the Dallas Morning News allowed members of the military to post photos and messages for friends and family via the papers online site.211 Several reporters also said they faced tough decisions as to how involved they could get in the activities of the unit before they felt their journalistic integrity was compromised. Jim Landers, an embedded reporter for the Dallas Morning News, said that he had to mentally catalogue the possible ethical ramifications when asked to relieve the soldier holding the IV bag for a wounded Iraqi. In the end, Landers decided to take over holding the bag so that the soldier who had been doing the job could return to his unit.212 Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and health correspondent for CNN, had media ethicists questioning his choice when he elected to operate on a two-year-old Iraqi child who had received a grave head wound after U.S. troops fired on the taxi in which the child rode at a checkpoint.213 Dismissing the criticism outright, Gupta declared that he was medically and morally obligated to help because the medical team did not have a resident neurosurgeon.214 Perhaps the most pronounced instances of getting caught up in soldierly life happened when embeds were confronted with the ethical ambiguity of handling
Sylvester and Huffman (2005). Reporting From the Front. p. 87. Ibid. p. 213. 213 Bob Steele. Journalist/Physician: Can He Be Both? Talk About Ethics, Poynter Online. Apr. 4, 2003. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=36&aid=28574. But this situation with Sanjay Gupta the physician and Sanjay Gupta the journalist is not as black and white as it might appearHow does Gupta the reporter and Gupta the doctor reconcile his competing roles and competing obligations? Does the Hippocratic oath duty always trump the journalistic responsibility to gather information and report stories? 214 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 33.
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weapons when in life-threatening situations. St. Louis-based radio journalist Charlie Brennan, who was embedded with the U.S. Army V Corps, reported that he had a sergeant major attempt to hand him semi-automatic pistol during an incursion into Nasiriyah during the second full day of combat operations.215 Brennan, citing the PAG memos ground rules, which stipulated that [m]edia embedded with U.S. forces are not permitted to carry personal firearms, rebuffed the soldiers repeated offering of the firearm.216 After the incident, the immediacy of the danger and his ethical obligations to his family made Brennan reconsider and terminate his embed assignment when the V Corps was still 100 miles from Baghdad. Most embedded journalists found very quickly that they had no ability to control the level of jeopardy to which they were exposed.217 Gordon Dillow of the Orange County Register admitted that he accepted a weapon from one of Alpha Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiments members. During a skirmish with rocket-propelled grenade-carrying Iraqis on the outskirts of Baghdad, Dillow said, a Marine handed him a hand grenade. I would rather have had an M-16, he said. Though he never deployed it, Dillow said he held onto the grenade until it became clear that he could not write and hold the weapon at the same time. Again, Dillow was one of the few embeds who readily admitted a situational bias stemming from living with the troops. It always amuses me when reporters say, Oh, you know, I have no feelings about an issue, or Im totally
215
Charlie Brennan. Upon reflection: the war in Iraq. The American Editor. May/June 2003. posted online at the American Society of Newspaper Editors. July 1, 2003. http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?ID=4753. 216 Public Affairs Guidance (PAG). Sec. 4.C. 217 Brennan (2003). Upon reflection: the war in Iraq.
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objective, he said. I dont see how anybody can do it. Thats what editors are for to make sure that your copy comes out objective.218 Dillows reliance on editorial intervention was echoed by a number of embeds and analysts of the embedding program. As it happened, the haphazard contextualizing of raw information from embeds at the tip of the spear by editors in both the print and broadcast media proved to be one of the greatest ideological impediments to comprehensive coverage by embedded reporters during the war, which will be demonstrated in the following section.
Editorial Inconsistency, Home-Front Bias, and the 9/11 Effect Despite the relatively objectivethough limitedobservations of embedded reporters being transmitted to television news stations and editorial desks throughout the world, the inconsistency of editorial treatment and tone when the reports had passed out of embeds hands proved an enormous obstacle to the American public receiving the full scope of war coverage. The inability of Washington sources to combat Pentagon spin combined with jingoism informed in part by the attacks of September 11, 2001 further limited the scope and reach of the reporting done by embeds.
218
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 53.
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Print Embeds
One factor that allowed print reporting to come away from its Iraq coverage with fewer accusations of bias or blatant cheerleading was that reporting in newspapers and magazines was able to offer more in-depth coverage of the war. Stephen Hess, a former war correspondent now with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said that the war has been superbly reported by newspapers. The stories have been rich in variety, coming at this from so many different angles.219 However, the print medium as a whole was not exempt from the propagandism that scholars accused news organizations of perpetrating, as evidenced by a military press officer speaking to NPRs John Burnett. Standing by the mess hall, the PAO said to Burnett while scanning a color spread on preparations for battle in Time magazine, Money cant buy this kind of recruitment campaign.220 New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges contended that the supportive tone of newspaper coverage came from print embeds inability to look at Iraq through any other lens than that of the military: Thats a very distorted and self-serving view.221 After major combat operations ceased, the Times acknowledged as much, publishing a front-page admission on May 26, 2003 that balanced coverage had been sorely lacking during the buildup to, and in the first few weeks of, the Iraq War.222 I think all the media we went with the wave of trying to tell the story, but we werent going against the American authorities, said Michel DuCille, picture editor for The
Sherry Ricchiardi. Close to the Action. American Journalism Review. May 2003. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2991. 220 Burnett (2003). Embedded/Unembedded II (Dispatches: slices of the war). 221 cited in Poynter Online. Apr. 3, 2003. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=60&aid=28205. 222 The Times and Iraq. (Editorial staff). May 26, 2004.
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Washington Post. Much like the New York Times, the Post published a front-page acknowledgement in August 2004 that it had not given fair treatment to stories that openly criticized the Bush administrations reasons for initiating the conflict in Iraq.223 Because the embedded reporters knew that they could only provide a narrow slice of the war from a limited vantage point, said Knight-Ridder managing international editor Mark Seibel, editors were at the mercy of reporters in Washington to give stories context.224 However, reporters in both Washington and Qatar said that bureaucracy and Pentagon spin often hampered their ability to verify reports from embedded journalists on the ground. Alicia C. Shepard said that Pentagon correspondents were often stonewalled by military officials who promised to get back to them in a few hours, or even a few days, about a skirmish just reported by an embedded colleague. Shepard also noted that many journalists working away from the front lines were frustrated with the seeming unwillingness of Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brookswho often conducted CENTCOM press briefings in lieu of the then-commander Gen. Tommy Franksto elaborate on reports by embeds in the field.225 Editors had to decide who was right, said San Diego Union-Tribune embed Jim Crawley. Do they believe the reporter talking to the Pentagon, or do they believe the reporter on the ground being shot at? Because of ground-level spin and distortion, though, not even the embeds accounts could be relied upon entirely.226
Robertson (2004). Images of War. Lens Crafters. (2004). 225 Alicia C Shepard. Narrowing the Gap. Chicago: McCormick Tribune Foundation. 2004. 226 Burnett (2003). Embedded/Unembedded II (Dispatches: slices of the war). A week after the fall of Baghdad, Burnett disembedded himself and hired a driver and translator to investigate the effects of a 500-pound precision-guided bomb on the village of Taniya, southeast of Baghdad. The after-mission
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The 9/11 Effect
The problem with the embedding program, argues one scholar, was not that the embedded reporters were looking through a soda straw, or seeing the war from a very narrow point of view informed only by direct interaction with soldiers and action reports from unit commanders. Fisher contends that the embeds were looking through a distinctly American soda straw.227 Many embedded reporters said that they were able to identify inherent bias toward the U.S. and American activities.228 Newsweek reporter Kevin Peraino said that the magazine has a staff of senior writers and editors who were good at rooting out bias in embedded reporters copy. The writers we have in Washingtonare very effective in crafting pieces in a way where theyre not casting a one-sided light on it.229 By positing a 9/11 effect, I do not aim to disprove a pro-American slant among embeds, but to argue that they were shortchanged by an amplification of pro-Americanismcontrary to Perainos assertionexhibited by news organizations, most specifically national network and cable news outlets. What is essentially a discounting of embedded reporters already challenged clear-sightedness proved to be another way in which the individual embeds coverage failed to provide a wide view of the war.
reports had said that only tanks and tracked vehicles in the area had been destroyed, while Taniya residents told Burnett that 31 civilians had been killed in their beds by the bombing. 227 Skiba (2003). Journalists embodied realities of Iraq war. 228 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 43. [B]ecause these wars are so short, the idea that this is going to play out and that youre going to get the other side doesnt happen. All you get is this kind of initial rah-rah sideThere is this built-in bias. Okay, lets just accept that. 229 Ibid. p. 265.
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It is difficult not to notice some of the glaring misses in coverage made by the American press in the months leading up to the start of the Iraq War, such as the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agencys refuted a report that both President Bush and Britains Prime Minister Tony Blair cited, supposedly disclosing that the Hussein regime was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon, a story which got play in the United Kingdom press but produced one buried story in the United States.230 Or the 2000 report by the neoconservative group Project for a New American Century, picked up by some online sources and by the Scottish Daily Herald but largely ignored by the American mainstream press, declaring that one of the new administrations goals was to fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars and perform the constabulary duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions (like the Middle East).231 Overt press patriotism is not a new phenomenon, however. Historian Geoffrey Stone says that after the enactment of the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798, newspaper writers held back from criticizing the administration of then-President John Adams for fear of being tried under the strict seditious libel law as the country hovered on the edge of a possible war with France. Those who were vehemently opposed to the Adams administration, the Federalist government that enacted the law, were often reduced to pamphleteeringand even then not safe from prison time and fines. 232 Polarization in a protectivist society can be ascribed to the framework journalism
Deepa Kumar. Media, War, and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management During the 2003 Iraq War. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Vol. 3, no. 1. (Mar. 2006). p. 57. 231 Rebuilding Americas Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. Project for a New American Century, http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf. 232 Stone (2004). Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. pp. 33-61.
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critic Walter Lippmann said in 1922 that it is necessary to establish in wartime: the idea of an us and a them in order to allow the public to grasp the situations about which they must make vital life decisions.233 With regard to the atmosphere in which the Iraq War was launched, Gina Barton and Beverly L. Campbell posit that the contagious jingoism after September 11, 2001which compelled some television reporters to wear flag pins or ribbons on their lapelsforced self-censorship in a climate of almost mandatory national solidarity.234 A preexisting air of national pride, in turn, makes the citizensin whose number journalists are includedmore susceptible to propaganda, argues media theorist Nancy Snow. The warriors and those who profit from war try to persuade us that were one big happy family. Its always our national interest, national security, national defense, instead of somebodys security and interest.235 A countrys citizens are subject to a scripting of large-scale tragic events, set in motion by media reports, which cue participants as to what to say and what to expect, said author Thomas de Zengotita. De Zengotita mentioned not only 9/11, but the school shootings at Columbine High School and the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Because of media saturation, we feel as though we are present at all of these tragic events and are emotionally impacted accordingly, de Zengotita said.236
Lippmann (1922.) Public Opinion. p. 16. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. 234 Gina Barton and Beverly L. Campbell. How American should the American press be? Quill. Vol. 89, issue 10. (Dec. 2001). pp. 18-21. 235 Snow (2003). Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 911. (introduction.) 236 Me is For Media. On the Media. National Public Radio. Apr. 22, 2007.
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One of the greatest mistakes made by critics of media response to 9/11 is the automatic presumption that due to the nature of their job that journalists are should be unaffected by the happenings they cover. Were a veteran news anchor like Dan Rather unaffected by the events of September 11, 2001, he likely would not have declared, George Bush is the President, he makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where. Rather also said that journalists were afraid of being too critical of the government post-9/11.237 His assertion was borne out by at least two instances in which journalists were rebuked by their respective news organizations for voicing dissent. MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield said at a 2003 lecture at Kansas State University that America tends to disregard the First Amendment when it becomes unpalatable. Parent company NBC released a public statement saying Ms. Banfield does not speak for NBC News.238 CNNs Christiane Amanpour was similarly taken to task for saying the press was muzzled andself-muzzled after 9/11. CNN Newsgroup president Jim Walton said her comments do not reflect the reality of our coverage.239 The climate of unquestioning support combined with fear of reprisal for criticism helped to create the timid, pro-American news organizations that embedded their reporters with U.S. troops at the start of the Iraq War in 2003, said Rutgers University Professor Deepa Kumar. With titles and logos that in no uncertain terms
Matthew Engel. US media cowed by patriotic fever, says CBS star. The Guardian (London). May 17, 2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/may/17/terrorismandthemedia.broadcasting. There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around peoples necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced [in America], you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions. 238 Into the Buzzsaw. Kristina Borjesson, ed. p. 16 239 Into the Buzzsaw. p. 16
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establish us and them in news coverage, it was almost a foregone conclusion which side would receive favorable coverage and which would not.240
Broadcast Embeds
Embedded television reporters seemed to delight in presiding over the confusion and chaos of bombings and gun battles on-screen, narrating every ear-shattering mortar explosion with the dedicated ferocity of a weather reporter standing in a hurricane.241 Terence Smith captures this breathless feeling with an account of CNNs Martin Savidge reporting on a foray into Baghdad on Apr. 9, 2003. The picture, as Smith describes it, is grainy but distinguishableshowing blossoms of light silhouetting Savidge. He describes the sounds in the vignette, tries to inform viewers of what the unit is doing as he shouts over the rattle of small-arms fire at Paula Zahn back in the CNN studios. 242 A number of broadcast embeds testified that they did not have control over their reports once they had finished shooting. Everyone at home saw more of the war than I did, Rick Levanthal of Fox News said. [W]hen people talk about different networks and how they did and all that, I cant really talk about that, and I cant compare the tone of the coverage because I honestly didnt see it.243 Describing an incident in which he happened upon a barber shop in a village near Najaf with a picture of the New York skylineincluding the World Trade Center towersin its
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Kumar (2006). Media, War and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management During the 2003 Iraq War. p. 53. 241 Robertson (2004). Images of War. Hardly half an hour goes by without some embedded ace breathlessly reporting, in real time, from the front. 242 Smith (2003). The Real-Time War: Defining news in the Middle East. 243 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 192.
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window, CBS Evening News correspondent Jim Axelrod said he took footage of both the barbershop window and several mutilated bodies nearby, but he does not know what was cut and what was left in. I still havent seen a lick of video; I havent seen a frame of what we produced.244 Editorial decisions with regard to footage once it left embeds hands became a major argument used by media scholars to argue that coverage of the war had been sanitized for an American audience that was both squeamish and unwilling to look at the human costs of war. Both broadcast and print embeds faced decisions by editors not to run photographs or footage of gruesome images, but the effect is more pronounced when examining the purely visual medium of television. According to Aday, Livingston, and Hebert, none of the U.S. channels observed in their studies paid much attention to U.S. or British casualties, Iraqi casualties, or civilian casualties, and coverage of these topics was conspicuously absent on the Fox News Channel evening shows and on CNNs Lou Dobbs Show, an analysis program. CNN correspondent Martin Savidge describes an episode in which several Iraqi fighters in an industrial complex were gunned down by American forces after they refused to stop advancing. Savidge and his camera operator, Scott McWhinnie, filmed part of the aftermath of this episode, some of which was graphic and bloody in nature. They warned CNN of some of the content when transmitting the story. Ive heard talk that it will air someday, but it has not yet. He also mentioned the killing of two American civilian contractors in Kuwait. The Kuwait Press ran a photograph of
244
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 27.
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one of the dead men on the front page, while U.S. news sources ran sanitized pictures of a bullet-riddled truck.245 CBS White House correspondent John Roberts agreed. I couldnt walk up to a bus that had been hit by 25-mm cannon fire and see all the dead Iraqis lying around, blown up into bits and pieces, headless bodies or whateverI can report on thatbut I certainly cant show those pictures on television. You have to sanitize your coverage somewhat for American sensibilities, but really its just the pictures that were sanitized. It certainly wasnt the words.246 That wasnt the experience of National Public Radio reporter Eric Westervelt. A listener had written in to the Washington-based network complaining that the sounds of tanks and guns in the background had been sensationalist. Westervelt fired back angrily, saying it was realistic, and it wasnt a gruesome picture of a mutilated corpse or injured child. Sensationalist? he said. What would they like instead? A story about war with people drinking tea?247 There is significant evidence that network presentation proved detrimental to what the Aday, Livingston, and Hebert claim was largely balanced coverage by embeds in the field.248 The 2005 study further supports my assertion that the narrowness of embedded-reporter coverage was amplified by overt jingoism on the part of the news organization. Across stories by 205 unembedded, domestically-based beat reporters and 398 news anchors, 11.1 percent of reports by domestic journalists adopted a tone supportive of the U.S. effort in Iraq. 11.9 percent of stories
245
Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 277. Ibid. p. 173. 247 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 324. 248 Aday, Livingston, and Hebert (2005). Embedding the Truth. p. 15. [E]mbedded reporters had among the highest percentage of neutral stories (91 percent) of any type of reporter.
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by network anchors had a pro-American tone during the sample period from March 20 to April 20, 2003.249 Of the guests invited by networks to give opinions, or chosen as interview subjects, retired military officials spoke positively of the war in 34 percent of stories, while U.S. political officials did so in 11.6 percent. Those who spoke positively least often about the war effort were current U.S. military officials (with 6.6 percent) and soldiers on the ground. Embedded reporters and soldiers interviewed in the field adopted a positive or supportive tone toward the war effort in the same percentage of stories (9 percent). 250 One particular channel, Fox News, made no bones about its pro-American stance. Fox News president Roger Ailes said on the air that there was nothing wrong with supporting the U.S. troops and U.S. effort in Iraq.251 Fox contributed significantly to the pro-war slant on coverage, hosting the preponderance of the stories in which news anchors interviewed retired military officials. And 60 percent of stories in which an anchor (rather than an embedded reporter or a beat reporter) led a discussion with a retired military official were positive in tone over the course of the sample period.252 The jingoistic tone of coverage and decisions by the Fox News higher-ups caused viewership of the cable news channel to soar to 3 million after Sept. 11 and into the first three months of the invasion, The New York Times reported. In order to make up for lagging viewership, Jim Rutenberg claimed in the Times, MSNBC and to an extentCNN tried to capture more of the politically conservative viewing
Aday, Livingston, and Hebert (2005). Embedding the Truth.. Table 3. Ibid. Table 5. Domestic beat reporters and news anchors had 88.9 percent and 88.7 percent neutral stories over the sample period, respectively. 251 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 192. 252 Aday, Livingston, and Hebert (2005). Embedding the Truth. p. 14.
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audience that had facilitated Foxs meteoric ratings rise. Both networks succeeded somewhat in claiming a larger slice of the conservative audience than they had had before, with CNN and MSNBC viewership rising to 2.65 million and 1.4 million average daily viewers, respectively.253 Another factor contributing to ratings growth, especially in cable news, was the intense, theatrical live coverage of Shock and Awethe aerial bombardment of Baghdadand skirmishes between armed forces units and Iraqi soldiers on the road to the capital.254 A Los Angeles Times poll in Apr. 2003 showed that around 70 percent of Americans were getting most of their news about the war from cable networks such as MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and CNN.255 Mark Effron, MSNBCs vice president for live news programming, opined that this was because print news sources such as newspapers were obsolete by the time they reached the readers doorstep, whereas live 24-hour cable television coverage had its finger on the pulse of the war constantly. Not only did it show vivid reports from television embeds in the field, but tempered them with central command and Pentagon briefings and interspersed them with the musings and insights of hired consultants and guests such as retired, high-ranking military personnel.256
Jim Rutenberg. Cables war coverage suggests a new Fox Effect on television. The New York Times. Apr. 16, 2003. 254 Michiko Kakutani. Iraq War coverage: blurring the lines between movies and real life. the New York Times. Mar. 25, 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/25/arts/television/25SHOW.html. The start of the war caused business at movie theaters to drop by 25 percent on Wednesday as people stayed home to watch the war, and snack-food sales and restaurant deliveries thrived. The opening salvos of the war had taken the place of prime-time entertainment, and television stations did their best to serve up gaudily produced coverage: the war in Iraq as the ultimate in reality television, as the apotheosis of every favorite Hollywood genre, from the combat thriller to the coming-of-age tale to the blow-'em-up, special- effects extravaganza. 255 Sharkey (2003). The Television War. 256 Rachel Smolkin. Media Mood Swings. American Journalism Review. June 2003. http://ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=3040.
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Jack Shafer argued that TV news inflated embeds footage of intermittent small-arms fire into tense shootouts, and minor skirmishes became full-bore battles on the screen.257 Detroit News reporter John Bebow reflected on what he also perceived as TV news outlets tendency to overhype combat situations. If youre watching the fear channels, its easy imagining that the war zone must be this hellish place filled with an unbelievable amount of gunfire its just not like that. It was definitely zany, but it wasnt every-minute dangerous.258 In the instance of intense viewership, according to the director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, it is even more heavily incumbent on news programs to correct for existent bias and provide balanced coverage wherever possible. If there are misperceptions emerging, if there are biases if the goal is to end up with an informed citizenry or electorate, then one has to compensate for these tendencies.259 Perhaps the 2003 Iraq War and the consequent fallout with regard to objective coverage will prove a lesson to U.S. media outlets, suggests David Elstein, a BBC Veteran who helped found BBC Channel Five in 1997 and has worked for the Britishbased satellite television network Sky. Elstein writes for OpenDemocracy.net that the BBC has grown even stricter in its insistence upon objectivity since the Thatcher government called the network out for its lack of visible nationalistic support during the 1982 Falklands War. For their insistence upon casting a cold eye on coalition activities in Iraq, Elstein said, BBC reporters were accused of having a leftward political slant.260
Shafer (2003). Embeds and Unilaterals: The press dun good in Iraq. But they could have dun better. 258 Katovsky and Carlson (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq. p. 2. 259 Lori Robertson. Baghdad Urban Legends. American Journalism Review. October/November 2003. http://ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=3408. 260 David Elstein. Caught in the crossfire: broadcasting in wartime. June 24, 2003. OpenDemocracy.net. http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-journalismwar/article_1312.jsp.
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Chapter 5: Conclusion
As with many conflicts since Grenada, lack of access appears to have been the presiding factor depriving embedded reporters of the possibility of balanced, widescope coverage at the beginning of the 2003 Ir...