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Did the deployment of embedded reporters give the public a more accurate picture of events during the most recent Iraq conflict, or was it simply a ploy by the military to control the output of the media?
Introduction
In this report I will be looking at the role of embedded journalists in the most recent Iraq conflict and the whether they provided an accurate picture of what was going on during the war.I will do this first of all by comparing the role of the embedded reporter with that of unilateral and pool reporters. I will examine the pressures and expectations placed upon journalists in each role.
I will also be looking at the issue from the point of view of the coalition governments and the military who promoted the use of embeds. I will look at the rules they imposed and discuss the concerns that arose from their approach.
I will look at the various advantages and disadvantages of using embedded reporters from the point of view of the journalist, the news organisation and the viewer or reader back at home and discuss the issues of impartiality and objectivity in reporting.
Finally I will investigate the various types of censorship imposed on the reports of embeds by the military, media organisations and the self-censorship that journalists imposed on themselves.
For my research I attended a public debate hosted by Mediactive and Reporting the World, entitled Mediawar, held on November 24, 2004. Speakers included Roger Mosey, BBC Head of Television News, Jake Lynch, Director of journalism thinktank, Reporting the World, and Jim Maceda, an NBC correspondent
I will also be drawing from comments made at the Royal Television Society lecture on December 9, 2003 by Geraint Vincent, a reporter embedded with the British Paratroop Regiment, and Rob Bowles, a multi-skilled camera operator and video editor who travelled with US troops. My notes from both discussions are included in the appendix.
I will also use transcripts taken from a previous Reporting the World event, Reporting Iraq – What went right, what went wrong?, held on July 15, 2003 (appendix 3).
Embeds, unilaterals and the pool system
The recent Iraq war saw a huge increase in the use of embedded reporters – journalists assigned to a military unit. Although reporters have travelled with the military before (Cardiff, 2004), the scale of the embed project was unprecedented, with some reports claiming that at the height of the war up to 800 journalists were placed with regiments across Iraq. This new approach meant that the media could get closer than ever before to the action of the conflict.Embedded reporting has received much criticism compared to the work of independent journalists. However, during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, broadcast media tended to rely almost entirely on information from press pools. For that reason a comparison between unilateral reporters and embedded reporters seems unfair. However, the most recent Iraq conflict has demonstrated that unilateral reporters have found themselves in increasing danger. Since the start of the 2003 Iraq war 27 western journalists had been killed in the space of a year (www.cpj.org, 2004).
In previous conflicts such as the Gulf War, reporters were normally confined to press pools, relying on military briefings for information. This approach was also a feature in the more recent Iraq conflict although the introduction of embedded reporting added a further dimension to the information that was available.
Jon Swain, a reporter in the Gulf War, said that during the conflict US armed forces restricted the movements of journalists, citing security and safety concerns. The military was concerned that roaming journalists may pose a security threat by inadvertently disclosing army positions or other tactical secrets through their reports. They also claimed that journalists, who were clearly not militarily-minded, would pose a safety threat, both to themselves and the soldiers they were accompanying.
This pool approach to dealing with the media was extremely restricting as journalists were afforded little freedom. Although the reports they sent back weren’t censored, the information they received was heavily filtered.
“Correspondents, with rare exception, got much of their news at daily briefings. Last year in Afghanistan, the Royal Marines bottled up journalists in the heat and dust of Bagram airbase, taking them on pools of limited value.”
Swain (2003)
The obvious problem with the pool system of journalists was that it was very easy for the military to dictate the news agenda and feed them propaganda. As Jake Lynch (appendix 1) points out, propaganda does not necessarily mean deception, however, in a pool situation, with the military understandably intent on promoting their aims, information is filtered to the extent that very little of the full picture is likely to remain. Journalists confined to a base or hotels are unable to verify the facts that they are given or shoot footage of the events that they are reporting. Journalists who broke the rules by striking out on their own were routinely detained and usually deported.
Swain adds:
“The American military was ruthless with any journalist it caught acting independently of the pool, rounding them up and sending them all the way back to the JIB, the joint information bureau, hundreds of miles at the rear of Dhahran. They went so far as to try and get the Saudi authorities to throw several offenders out of the country.”
In the case of embedded reporting, these problems are partially resolved as reporters witness first hand the actions of the troops. But although they are out on the battlefield their movements are still confined and their experience is one that is shared with their unit.
A similar situation to the pool system was in place during the 2003 Iraq war when journalists were holed-up in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. According to Jim Maceda, a correspondent for NBC, the journalists were reliant on official briefings throughout this period. Their role as broadcast journalists was also very limiting because they were timetabled to produce live reports for regular bulletins back in the UK and US. This, according to Maceda, made it virtually impossible to report very much of what was going on because reporters were “chained to the satellite dish” (appendix 1).
The nature of news broadcasting meant that it was imperative to get live footage every hour – even if it was just of the reporter standing on the roof in Baghdad – to feed the demand for 24 hour news channels at home. This was restricting because the importance of transmitting a live report was usually placed above the process of newsgathering and the verbal content of the transmission.The sheer number of embedded journalists in Iraq meant an array of footage was available to broadcasters. Geraint Vincent, who was embedded with the paras, prepared reports for a number of channels including CNN and ITV. Improved technology such as laptops and satellite phones enabled him to send packages back to London from his position on the battlefield (appendix 2).
Another alternative to embedded reporting is what has become known as the ‘unilateral’ reporter, journalists who travel independently of military units and are offered no protection by the armed forces. The benefit of this style of reporting is that a more balanced picture can be obtained about events. Inevitably, a journalist embedded with a British army division is unlikely to obtain a human interest story about the suffering of ordinary Iraqi people, whereas an independent reporter is technically free to investigate any aspect of the conflict.
Although independent reporters existed during the Iraq conflict, they operated under extremely dangerous conditions and many were killed. A debate continues about the reasons for the high number of fatalities to media professionals. I will discuss this in the next chapter.
Why embed? The official line
The massive exercise undertaken by coalition forces to embed journalists was seen by some camps as a new way of controlling the media (Byrne, 2003). The US government and the military were keen to stress that there would be no censorship of news and the embedding process meant that more journalists were able to report from the front line, producing first hand reports about daily events.Victoria Clarke, assistant secretary of defence for public affairs and chief spokesperson at the Pentagon said:
“If you’ve followed the Pentagon for some time, you know we’ve tried and Secretary Rumsfeld has tried since the very beginning to be very transparent in our business… We knew the more people saw the US military, the more they would understand the mission.”
(Cited in Tumber & Palmer, 2004, p.13)
The US saw embedding as a PR opportunity. They repeatedly referred to embeds as ‘independent journalists’ who would have the opportunity to report on events whether they were good or bad. Bryan Whitman, deputy assistance secretary for public affairs at the Pentagon, said that embedding was one of the principal means of coverage of the Iraq conflict, however he also acknowledged that:
“Because it is very deep, rich coverage… it’s not very broad.”
(Cited in Tumber & Palmer, 2004, p.14)
Prior to the Iraq invasion the Pentagon also warned media organisations that if their reporters were not embedded they could risk being fired upon (CNN, 2003). Richard Sambrook, BBC’s head of news said:
“The fact is that we were inhibited from being able to work independently to the extent that we would have liked, and that definitely had an impact on the journalism on the overview we were able to present.”
As the conflict progressed, increasing numbers of reports implied that the US had deliberately targeted the independent media (Knightley, 2003 and Tryhorn, 2003). Up until May 2004, some 27 western journalists had been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the conflict (www.cpj.org, 2004), a sizeable number were the victims of ‘friendly fire’, all were independent reporters.
The military argued that embedding reporters would enable them closer access to events but would also help protect the lives of both the media and the soldiers on the battlefield.
Tony Pawson, the MoD's director general said:
"The coverage which was given by the embeds could not have been obtained in any other way and it did add significantly and valuably to the overall picture we were seeing."
(BBC News, 2003)
However, critics including the European Broadcasting Union argued that the system meant independent reporters were frozen out by the military as a kind of punishment for not toeing the line (Byrne, 2003).
The ability of freelance journalists to report on the war was also restricted because embed places were allocated to news organisations and not to individual reporters. This made it difficult for freelancers to get in on the action; however it enabled the US Department of Defense to keep tabs on how the media reported the war (Tumber & Palmer, 2004).
The process of embedding journalists on the most part began with a rigorous training programme and reporters went on to spend months with one group of soldiers. For the military and coalition governments, this also had other benefits other than a PR exercise. Since national service ended in the coalition countries there have been fewer reporters with any specialist or detailed knowledge about the military. The embedding exercise would change that trend. It would also create a more trusting relationship between the generals and the media, especially after the problems in Vietnam, when the media was widely blamed for the loss of public support for the war.
Impartiality and objectivity
Embedded reporting has come under criticism for a number of reasons. BBC reporter John Simpson declined to be embedded because he felt it would compromise his professional ability to be impartial and objective.“Mr Simpson, one of those journalists who covered the war without being ‘embedded’ said he had felt working from within a military unit would have compromised his journalism. He told BBC Radio 4's Today: "I didn't want to be part of it because I didn't want to be dependent on the people I was reporting on for my security, my food, my transport. We need to have independent journalists moving around."”
(BBC News Online, 12 November, 2003)
Inevitably if a journalist is relying on a regiment for his or her survival it will become very difficult to criticise the actions of those troops, especially if any reports sent are being vetted before they are transmitted. Furthermore, if a reporter is living, breathing and sleeping alongside a particular group, then that group’s opinions will be the only views heard by the embed. It is natural that the reports will be one sided. With a lack of an opposing argument it is very easy to slip into the mindset of your companions. This makes impartiality very difficult.
There was noticeably very few Iraqis in the embed reports. The only opportunity to film or report upon Iraqi civilians was when they were welcoming troops, as was the case in much of southern Iraq where resistance to the coalition was relatively weak. By travelling with the troops access to everyday human interest stories was very limited.
One Canadian journalist commented:
“By keeping ‘unilateral’ journalists out of Iraq, the Americans have succeeded in reducing independent reporting of the war, and I believe that was exactly their plan from the beginning. I spoke to an old man in the town of Safwan after he'd fought through a crowd to obtain a box of food and water delivered by the Kuwait Red Crescent Society. He was obviously grateful, but distraught at the site of foreign soldiers on his land. "We don't want the British, and we don't want the Americans," he told me. "We don't want to become another Palestine." You're not getting interviews like that from embedded reporters; you're more likely to see a glorified view of American power and morality, in a war that much of the world considers unnecessary, unjustified or plain wrong, and is being covered at every crossroads, at every captured bridge by a press corps that's sleeping with the winner.”
(Workman, 2003)
Because of the daily cut and thrust of the conflict, reporters on embedded with troops had little time to reflect or report on the wider issues surrounding the war; they were only able to comment on the immediate events surrounding them because, although they were witnessing the stories first-hand, information about the wider conflict and its implications was limited. Richard Sambrook, BBC’s head of news said:
“You get a better flavour but you are now further up the information chain in the field, so that is why you get the news like Umm Qasr has fallen and there's an uprising in Basra, because you are hearing from the military before they have worked out what is happening and you are live on air telling the world about it before they really know what is going on… even if we think we can understand the issues it raises I am quite sure the audience doesn't, which is why you got people saying, "the BBC says this and it turns out to be wrong". Well, what we said was what we thought we'd been told at the time, and if it then turned out to be wrong we had to go back and correct it.”
The more positive aspects of embedded reporting mean that journalists can verify for themselves the validity of claims. They offer a unique first-hand account of the conflict, free from censorship although not necessarily free from bias. Journalists are no longer dependent on briefings and get close to the action as it is happening.
Rob Bowles, an embedded camera operator with US forces, said the work of independent reporters offered:
“a more broad and accurate picture of the chaos brought about by military action”
This view was reinforced by Audrey Gillan, a Guardian reporter who was embedded with the Household Cavalry:
“The thing about being embedded and the 100-odd people who were embedded is that we had completely different individual experiences and everything that we saw was completely different. But the thing that we had in common was it was a microcosm of the war. My view of the war was out of back of a very small window that size (hands mark a small rectangle in the air) in an armed reconnaissance vehicle or in the middle of the desert... …We maybe saw more stuff but it lacked context. We certainly lacked context in the sense that we did not know what was going on in the war and that’s one of the things that we have to acknowledge about being embedded. We cannot pretend that it is anything other than the view of where that correspondent is.”
Journalists believed the reports they sent back were forming part of a jigsaw that would inform and reinforce more general reports from central command, however the lack of briefings at central command attracted criticism from the reporters based there. Sketchy information meant that they were unable to put the close-up reports of the embeds into any context.
Censorship
Although the coalition stressed that there would be no censorship of the media, the two embeds that I spoke to suggested that this was not the case.Rob Bowles said that in January and February of 2003 he went to Iraq to report on the weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi public opinion. However, the news broadcasts he watched on cable TV from the UK via cable and satellite bore little resemblance to his own experiences or the reports that he had filed (appendix 2).
After the war began he said that there was no censorship and every single package that he sent back was broadcast uncut. He said: “There was so little coverage getting through, broadcasters were grateful for any reports they received.” He also pointed out that US film crews were not given the freedom to edit their own packages and all their material had to be sent to Washington for editing.
Aside from the gate keeping that was going on back in London and Washington, there was also a big difference in the way that US and UK troops treated the embedded reporters.
Rob Bowles experienced no censorship or restriction from the US military about what he could or could not film and they informed him of all their military plans. In fact he said the troops and leaders were extremely forthcoming and would give his extensive and detailed information without even being asked.
Geraint Vincent said his experience was very different. He said the Paras and British military were extremely paranoid about what was being sent back and regularly intervened. He was also kept in the dark about what was happening and where the unit would be heading next (appendix 2).
Both men described a very different situation in Baghdad itself, where reporting restrictions were placed on the reporters in the Palestine Hotel. They were only allowed to broadcast pictures of the Presidential Compound. This was not a reflection of life in Baghdad as both men said their experience of the war in the city was fairly normal. The Presidential Palace was the only area to be bombarded, while in residential areas life was going on almost as normal and the houses were unscathed. However, Iraqi broadcasting restrictions meant no pictures of the undamaged residential areas could be shown.
Self-censorship also took place as a result of rules imposed by the military. Several journalists were sent home for disclosing too much information, while another was sacked for conducting an interview with an Iraqi TV station (Tumber & Pamer, 2004: 31). The ejection of journalists who inadvertently broke the rules inevitably encouraged other reporters to remain well within their guidelines and not to push the boundaries of their reporting for fear of losing their jobs or being deported.
British reporters were also subject to broadcasting decency rules which prevented them from showing violent or graphic images so regularly censored themselves to produce packages that would fall within these guidelines. As a result, the media was accused of presenting a sanitised version of the war. Despite being awarded unprecedented access to the front line, reporters failed to show viewers the extent of the horror that they had witnessed.
Conclusion
The increased use of embedded reporters has added a new dimension to war reporting, although their role, as with all other forms of journalism, is affected by a variety of other influences.It is difficult to compare the effectiveness of embedded reporters with that of independent journalists as embeds have not replaced the independent media; they are a group of journalists who are present at the behest of the government and military. However, the large scale employment of embeds has been coupled with a concerted effort to discourage independent journalism. This is a cause for concern.
The role of embeds has meant there is very little reliance on pool journalists, which most people agree, served a very limited function. In this sense, the move towards embedded reporting can be seen as a positive one. However, the pool still serves a function, where official briefings about the overview of the war can provide valuable context to the reports received from embeds on the battlefield.
The number of independent reporters killed throughout the conflict was a cause of immense concern. Many reporters risked their lives in an effort to maintain their impartiality and while a disproportionate number of unilateral reporters were killed, there were no reported casualties among embedded reporters. On the face of it, this appears to indicate that embeds had a distinct advantage as they had access to military information and the front line while working in a comparatively low-risk situation.
However, claims that the US military were reckless or, even worse, deliberately targeted independent reporters call into question whether the military was actively trying to discourage reporters from going it alone. If so, this surely has implications for role of the media as a source of reliable and balanced information for voters.
While embeds were subject to the rules of their military units, they did have access to the front line of the conflict as it unfolded. However, despite this unprecedented level of access, reporters were still reliant on the troops for their survival, which in turn compromised their ability to present a balanced argument. Embeds were also unable to leave their units to obtain independent accounts from Iraqi civilians or soldiers.
Embeds with British units experienced high levels of secrecy and censorship, while US embeds enjoyed unexpected freedom of information. Reporters in Baghdad also operated under Iraqi broadcasting restrictions which prevented them from showing civilian buildings.
After the conflict had started, the shortage of new footage meant that the majority of packages sent by reporters to the UK were broadcast in full; however, journalists compiling the packages were aware of broadcasting and military restrictions and filed their reports accordingly. Many admitted censoring their packages to prevent them from being censored elsewhere at a later stage.
Although embedding with the military inevitably gives a one-sided view of the conflict, there are also many benefits that cannot be found in other forms of reporting. Providing reports from embedded journalists are used in a balanced way alongside other sources, such reports are likely to raise the level of understanding of the war situation. However, in the case of the Iraq war, there was a tendency to rely too much on embedded reporters, which made the overall understanding of the war very difficult.
Embedded Reporting In Iraq: Introduction Embeds, Unilaterals and the Pool System Why Embed? The Official Line Impartiality and Objectivity Censorship Conclusion References:
• BBC News (2003) MoD media chief defend 'embeds', available online:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/uk_politics/3263223.stm• Byrne, Ciar (2003) Independents 'frozen out' by armed forces, available online: http://media.guardian.co.uk/
iraqandthemedia/story/
0,12823,928254,00.html• Campagna, Joel & Sabra, Hani (2004) Under threat: Iraqi journalists frequently face hazardous conditions on the job, available online: http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/
2004/iraq_journ_5_04/
iraq_journ_5_04.html• CNN (2003) Pentagon warns reporters, available online: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/
meast/02/27/iraq.tracker.update/• Knightley Phillip (2003) British Journalism Review Vol. 14, No. 2, 2003, pages 7-14, History or bunkem?, available online: http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/
2003/no2_knightley.htm• Lewis, Justin, et al. (2004), Too Close for Comfort: The Role of Embedded Reporting During the 2003 Iraq War, Cardiff University.
• Lynch, Jake (2004) Reporting Iraq - What went right? What went wrong? in Biressi, A. & Nunn, H. (eds.) (2004) Mediactive: Media War, London: Barefoot
• Simpson, John (2003) Reporting the war, online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
world/middle_east/2903807.stm• Tumber, Howard and Palmer, Jerry (2004) Media at War: The Iraq Crisis, London: Sage
• Tryhorn, Chris (2003) Military accused of targeting non-embedded journalists, available online: http://media.guardian.co.uk/
presspublishing/story/
0,7495,932459,00.html• Workman, Paul (2003) After the war, Canada’s perspective, available online: http://www.cbc.ca/news/iraq/
canada/correspondents_
workman030407.html
Appendices:
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
