Journalists Traveling with U. S. Troops

"Journalists are experiencing unprecedented access to the battlefield thanks to a partnership between the military and the media that has embedded journalists within specific military units. The embedded reporters have to follow several agreed upon rules as they live with the soldiers and report on their actions." (From the "Pros and Cons of Embedded Journalism, " PBS.org)

An "embedded journalist" is a reporter attached to a military unit that is involved in an armed conflict. This term was first used in the media coverage of the 2003 invastion of Iraq. The U. S. military responded to pressure from the news media who were disappointed by the level of access granted during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan. Some 775 reporters and photographers were traveling in the early part of 2003 as embedded journalists who signed contracts with the military that limited what they were allowed to report on.

Why were there embedded journalists with our military troops? I think that these journalists are being used by our military to get its own story told. Their presence is aimed at winning the war -- control of the information environment according to the strategy of our defense.

As an illustration of the control exerted over embedded reporters, the U.S. Coalition Forces Land Component Command in Kuwait pulled the credentials of two embedded journalists from the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, reportedly for publishing a picture of a bullet-ridden Humvee parked in a Kuwaiti camp. Torie Clarke, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs between April, 2001 and September, 2003, oversaw the Pentagon propaganda scheme that signed up more than 75 retired military officers. These officers, according to New York Times reporter David Barstow, are shown as military analysts in newspaper columns. The news correspondents driving around in military tanks, spoon-fed by the military, serving as mascots for them, seem to be deliver "factual information" to us, news consumers. How should we take these journalists' reporting when they present them as true and unbiased, fair and balanced? Just wondering...