Page 163 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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

before the invasion that media coverage almost never mentioned the possibility
that people would die when bombs were dropped on Baghdad. “We’ve forgotten
about the Iraqis. Who will document the effects of the bombing?” (personal com-
munication with the author, February 2003). When another journalist, soon to
embed with the U.S. military, was asked if they would be allowed to take pictures
of Iraqi civilian casualties, the response was, “We’re telling the U.S. military’s story,
that will be up to other journalists” (personal communication with the author).

EmBEDDing as a narraTivE FramEwork
The news value of the battlefield footage that embeds provided was so com-
pelling that while there were many more complex stories to tell—about the wider
international context, the Iraqi people, the economic implications, the reaction
of the Arab world, public opinion, debates about the rationale for the war and its
aftermath—these were eclipsed by a narrow focus on the fighting itself.
In the aftermath of the invasion, it is widely understood that the U.S. media
did not take an independent position with regard to the military operation, and
that critical coverage came only after the war continued to devastate Iraq and
kill American soldiers. But during the invasion, British broadcasters were aware
of the divided attitudes about the war in the United Kingdom and made efforts
to be impartial. So, for example, while the U.S. networks—following warnings
from the Pentagon—pulled their teams from Baghdad, British reporters stead-
fastly remained. And there is little evidence that broadcast journalists in the
United Kingdom were seduced by the embed program to become cheerleaders
for the U.S. forces. Research on the U.K. coverage suggests that more pro-war
accounts came from studios in London, not from the embeds in Iraq, whose
reports were much more nuanced.
One of the most significant changes brought about by embedding is that in
previous conflicts when war reporters had little access to the field, broadcasters
were heavily dependent on military briefings. During the 1991 war with Iraq,
media coverage was dominated by military briefings from Riyadh and Dhahran,
Washington and London. Especially in the case of British media, coverage of
the 2003 conflict represented a significant point of departure, with fewer reports
coming from central command (“CentCom”) headquarters in Qatar. Reports
from embeds, on the other hand, played a more significant role, providing a
great deal of the footage from the region.
Not only did the embed program thereby allow British viewers to get closer
to the front lines than in previous wars, it meant that, at least in the U.K. media,
there was more space for independent verification of information and that infor-
mation about the progress of the war was less clearly controlled by the military.
What the embed system did do, however, was bind journalists into a focus
on the progress of the war at the expense of broader contextual issues. The fact that
there were no embeds with Iraqi forces (for obvious reasons) combined with tra-
ditions of taste and decency to humanize the U.S.-led forces and dehumanize the
Iraqis. This war narrative then created its own momentum, making “liberated”
Iraqis more newsworthy than the many who had, at best, mixed feelings about