I appreciate this exchange very much. However, I miss one thing: embedded as well as unembedded journalists are often specialists for I don't know what but surely not for combat, neither at the strategic nor at the operational level. When you s'ee which language journalists often use it is clear that they don't have the slightest idea of military action: Usually, a group of irregulars carrying assault rifles are 'heavily armed'. In war terms, this is ridiculous, they are lightly armed as they have no armor and no artillery. The strategic retreat of Iraqi troop is described in general as the regime's falling apart. Its is anything but this: it shows that troops obey orders, that they retreat in order, that they fight if they czan gain local superiority. I didn't hear anyone give a serious military appreciation of the situation. Journalists, in the heat of the battle, see and report as far as the bullets sing. I guess this is the fault of a lack of professional training, Mr and Misses professors of journalism. If a war reporter can't distinguish a combat tank from an armed troop carrier, if he or she has no historical comparisons, what's the sense of sending someone to the front to report ? If not to be a member of a Propagandakompanie, the German version of embeddedness in the 1940s. By the way, the hurray patriotism of Murdoch and some? all? US television chains sometimes reminds me of their reporting style. As Europeans we were always so naive to confound Amercian self-interest dubbed "the Western civilisation" with our own one. But this was our fault. Thanks to Bush II. this is now corrected. Frank Thomas Paris Randolph Kluver (Assoc Prof) wrote:
I disagree with much of what Maximilian Forte says, based on my observations of the embedded journalists both within BBC and CNN, as well as the print journalists. To my thinking, the embedded journalists haven't been much help to the US at all, as they have only highlighted delays and difficulties that wouldn't signal much concern if they weren't there. When a reporter comes under fire, he/she says "the strategy is falling apart! We're gonna die!" Two telling examples, the Sunday afternoon (Singapore time) skirmish in Umm Qasr, which was portrayed on both networks as a major battle, along the lines of battle of the bulge. The nature of this coverage prompted the Iraqi information minister, who just a couple of hours earlier had said that all the footage from Umm Qasr was actually shot in Kuwait, as the coalition forces "weren't even in Iraq," to go on air to prove how effectively Iraq was repelling the troops, who were, in fact, in Iraq after all, and were getting a drubbing. The response of Iraqi TV illustrates, I think, that the embedded reporters are not really helping the US forces much.
A second example is the initial helicopter attacks in Medina, in which reporters as much as said that the hand guns fired at helicopters would prevent any effective air attack. Probes are a normal part of military strategy, and thus heavy resistance in one place is just more data, not to be confused with a true threat. Certainly the military units involved paid attention to these, but only as part of a much larger battle field. The following briefing by Tommy Franks was interesting, in that it showed that what military analysts and strategies took as a normal occurrence, the journalists interpreted ominously.
One final issue is the Jerusalem Post embedded reporter, Caroline Glick, who "broke" the story on the supposed chemical factory. Clearly, the pentagon said that news was "premature," as if it turned out to not manufacture weapons, the credibility of the US would suffer. It seems at this point that it is an arms cache, not a chemical plant. This illustrates my point, though, that the embedded reporters, although they are under orders to not reveal certain kinds of information, are something of a liability to the US forces.
I guess I am curious as to how the military would be able to embed journalists among the Iraqi civilians, since there seems to be a desire to do that. Remember, there are at least as many "independent" or "unilateral" journalists in Iraq as there are embedded. In fact, It seems that there are probably more independent journalists in Iraq, since as Forte has noted, out of 500 or so embedded journalists, a number of them are bored to tears, watching missiles fly out of warships, or sitting at military bases. I would be curious to know how many embedded jorunalists are actually in forward combat units. At least two, but most likely four, have already lost their lives, so the message coming from the Pentagon is just as likely a friendly warning as it is a threat.
Thus, the embedded journalists are more likely to undermine popular support for the battle, than to serve as cheerleaders, precisely because they have, in Forte's words, "very little in the way of critical analysis or concrete information". In fact, now that every columnist in every newspaper, including Maureen Dowd, is giving war advice, it seems much more accurate to say that the embedded reporters are not much help to the military and/or political strategies fo the administration. I would not argue that the program is to be suspended, as I think it is a valuable way of getting at least some perspective on the war. Tommy Franks says he is a "fan" of the embedded reporters, but my sense is that he likes them primarily because they serve primarily to present the "view from the field," and thus are a check against false allegations. If this post is too "off topic" for this listserve, perhaps Dr. Forte could email me his responses privately.
A. Randolph Kluver School of Communication and Information Nanyang Technological University 31 Nanyang Link Singapore, 637718 (65) 6790-5770 Fax (65) 6792-4329
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