An embedded civilian journalist taking photographs of US soldiers in Panama.
An embedded journalist is a news reporter who is
attached to a military unit involved in an armed
conflict. While the term could be applied to many historical interactions between journalists and military personnel, it
first came to be used in the media coverage of the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. The United States military responded to pressure from the
country's news media who were disappointed by the level of access granted during the 1991
Gulf War and in the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
At the start of the war in March of 2003, as many as 775 reporters and photographers were traveling as embedded journalists.
[1] These reporters signed contracts with the military that
limited what they were allowed to report on. [2] When asked
why the military decided to embed journalists with the troops, Lt. Col. Rick Long of the U.S. Marine Corps replied, "Frankly, our
job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to
attempt to dominate the information environment."[3]
Gina Cavallaro, a reporter for the Army Times, said, "They’re [the journalists] relying
more on the military to get them where they want to go, and as a result, the military is getting smarter about getting its own
story told."[4]
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. [4]
Some critics felt that the level of oversight was too strict and that embedded journalists would make reports that were too
sympathetic to the American side of the war, leading to use of the alternate term "inbedded journalist" or "inbeds". Nonetheless,
grainy video transmitted via satellite videophone
became enduring images of the conflict.
Joint training for war correspondents started in November of 2002 in advance of the March 2003 start of the war in Iraq.
Fictional Embedded Journalists
David Jansen's character of George Beckwith was in The Green Berets a forerunner of the modern embedded journalist
See also
References
External links
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