Page 247 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

Catapult the Media 237

tracts allowing the military to review all their reporting, and allowing for gov-
ernment censorship of potentially controversial, antagonistic, or hard-hitting
reporting, graphic coverage of civilian casualties being one of the most pertinent
examples. Jon Rosen's experiences with the U.S. army put this reality into better
perspective. Rosen, an American freelance reporter who spent two weeks em-
bedded with the U.S. Army near the Iraqi-Syrian border, found out the hard way
what happens when embeds challenge the military censors. Rosen's reports of
the U.S. Army's practice of mass detainment of Iraqis in hopes of gathering in-
formation on resistance activities was most unwelcome by his unit's commander
and public affairs officer. After publishing his findings with the Asia Times,
Rosen was blacklisted from the embed program. Such was Rosen's punishment
for criticizing the occupation and the behavior of American troops, as his reports
claimed that over 90 percent of the Iraqis detained by the U.S. Army were inno-
cent of any charges?'
But Rosen's experience is not identical to that of most embedded reporters,
who have taken well to military guidance of their reporting. Jim Axelrod of CBS
News, for example, displayed his attachment to the Third Infantry position from
which he was reporting by adopting the language of his unit. After one military
intelligence briefing, Axelrod reported that "we've been given orders," quickly
rephrasing that "soldiers have been given orders," although his equation of his
interests as a reporter with those of his unit left little doubt that embeds have
failed to serve as impartial observers in this conflict.96
Despite acknowledging some reservations about the program, Axelrod was
strongly in favor of the embedding process: "This will sound like I've drunk the
Kool-Aid, but I found embedding to be an extremely positive experience. . . .
We got great stories and they [the military and Bush administration] got very
positive coverage."97 Such an admission begs the important question: is the goal
of media coverage primarily to provide the American military and political lead-
ers with positive coverage, or to fairly assess the situation in Iraq independent of
official positions and government censorship? Expectations that media serve as
a "fourth estate," holding political and military leaders accountable, and expos-
ing deceptions, fabrications, and outright lies are clearly not served by the defer-
ential coverage discussed above.
Danny Schechter, founder of MediaChannel.org, comments on the close
relationship between reporters and troops, explaining: "Most embedded report-
ers claimed that they were not really restrained, but rather assisted in their work
by Pentagon press flacks. This is probably trueand the reason the system
worked so Most embeds' conformity with pro-war, pro-military per-
spectives, then, represents a voluntary choice to "get on board" in the war effort,
rather than focus upon critical aspects of the war.
Embedded reporting has been primarily concerned with controlling the flow
of information reaching the American people, in effect, shaping the public's
perceptions of the war in a way that reinforces the legitimacy of the war effort
and the Bush administration's public pronouncements about the "progress" of
the war. What better way to accomplish this goal than by turning media report-
ers and soldiers into allies? As the Rosen example indicates, the embedded ap-