Page 162 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Embedd ng Journal sts: How Close Is Too Close? | 1 1

FroM iran-Contra Fall guy to eMBedded
rePorter For Fox news

One former marine who became an embedded U.S. reporter during the invasion of Iraq
is of particular interest. Oliver North achieved notoriety during the televised Iran-Contra
hearings in the summer of 1987. A little-known Vietnam veteran who worked at the National
Security Council under the Reagan administration, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was im-
plicated as a key player in the scandal. He worked with former General Richard Secord and
others to supply arms to the “contras,” or counterrevolutionaries, fighting to overthrow the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Because the contras attacked Nicaraguan civilians and
were charged with human rights abuses, Congress had denied them military aid.
Oliver North, or “Ollie” as President Reagan called him, resigned his post along with Na-
tional Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter in November 1986, when Attorney General
Edwin Meese announced that sophisticated weapons systems had been sold to Iran and
money from the sales had been diverted to buy weapons for the contras.
When congressional hearings investigating the scandal were carried live on television,
the media spotlight cast an unusually favorable glow over North who, just as easily, could
have been cast in the role of villain. Though North admitted to supplying the contras against
congressional mandate, activities that were illegal and unconstitutional, his felony convic-
tion was overturned on a technicality because he had been granted immunity for his testi-
mony before congress. Sixteen years after being called before Congress for his role in the
Iran-Contra Affair, Oliver North was accepted as a legitimate journalist and hired by FOX
News, becoming one of the most visible embedded U.S. TV reporters covering the push
into Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

the United Kingdom in which a majority—52 percent—said that this kind of re-
porting can make war seem too much like fiction, and too easy to forget people
are dying. This idea was echoed in focus groups, in which people repeatedly
referred to the coverage as being like a “war film.” And indeed sometimes it was
a war film, as in the case of the Jessica Lynch story, or the various mooted in-
volvements of Hollywood in the Pentagon’s public affairs or psyops operations.

war wiThouT ConsEquEnCEs
Broadcasters found themselves irresistibly drawn into the action-packed
drama of a war against an almost invisible enemy (if Iraqi civilians were enig-
matic, the Iraqi soldiers were almost completely absent—rarely seen or dis-
cussed, but generally assumed to be supportive of Saddam Hussein). From the
pro-war perspective, the norms of taste and decency made it difficult for broad-
casters to show the more graphic images of death and destruction, giving the
narrative an almost fictional quality.
Journalists and critics had predicted that embedding would result in stories
biased toward the military’s perspective. Investigative reporter Greg Palast noted