Embedded Reporters: In the Heat of the Battle, Combating Media
Bias?
by Sterling
Witzke
June 2nd, 2003
Engineering 297C
Professor Bruce Lusignan
TA: David Roeske
Embedded Reporters: In the Heat of the
Battle, Combating Media Bias?
By Sterling Witzke
In February 1985, the Los Angeles Times polled 2,703 journalists to determine their political affiliation. What they found, was that liberals outnumbered conservatives in the newsroom by more than three-to-one. Seventeen percent identified themselves as conservative whereas a whopping fifty-five percent identified themselves as liberal. A few years later, Linda Lichter and Stanley Rothman performed a poll of Master’s degree candidates at the Columbia University School of Journalism and found “that aspiring reporters were even more liberal than those already in the profession.” (Baker and Bozell, page 42) This study found that 85 percent of the journalism students called themselves liberal. Only 4 percent voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, whereas 59 percent voted for Carter. These students even gave Fidel Castro more positive ratings than Reagan, and viewed Sandinistas more positively than Jerry Falwell, Jeane Kirkpatrick or Margaret Thatcher. Although some would think that media bias would lessen over time, these up and coming journalists show that the in the late 80’s future reporters were even more biased than the current reporters, causing bias to actually worsen as time progressed. In the 1992 presidential election, a mere 43 percent of Americans voted for Bill Clinton, but 89 percent of Washington bureau chiefs and reporters voted for him. A miniscule 7 percent of these bureau chiefs and reporters voted for Bush senior. As Ann Coulter writes in her book, Slander, “Indeed, the media elites covering politics would be indistinguishable from the Democratic Party, except the Democratic Party isn’t liberal enough. A higher percentage of the Washington press corps voted for Clinton in 1992 than did this demographic category: ‘Registered Democrats.’” (Coulter Page 56) The numbers don’t lie, and, statistically speaking, it would be very hard not to come to the conclusion that media bias is a blatant problem in the United States. In fact, in 1996 Bernard Goldberg, a longtime veteran of CBS News confessed in the Wall Street Journal that “the networks and other media elites have liberal bias.” This confession came after 30 years of working as a reporter and producer for CBS News. Goldberg feels bias in network media is so bad that he even wrote a number one best-selling book to educate the general public about the media’s bias titled Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. (Coulter Page 59) The most recent examples of this political bias can be found in the major networks’ reporting of the War on Iraq - Operation Iraqi Freedom. In this war, however, something drastically changed about the media, and specifically about war reporting. The war on Iraq has illuminated blatant media bias in certain US networks, but has also allowed for the emergence of embedded reporters as an agent to decrease bias and improve the overall quality of reporting.[1]
During wartime, network bias becomes even worse than during normal peacetime reporting. Going to war is such a major event that every reporter and news station wants part of the action. Because coverage of the war will be closely scrutinized and ratings depend heavily upon viewership, each network tries to put a spin on their coverage in order to obtain more viewers and higher ratings. As the coverage increases, so do instances of bias. As Mort Rosenblum writes in his book, Who Stole the News?, “Bias, inadvertent or otherwise, is difficult to excise from war reporting. Even now, with all of the talk about objectivity, American television anchors sometimes refer to ‘our troops.’ What is supposed to be the opposing force, seen from the center, is still ‘the enemy.’” He goes on to write, “Unconscious bias creeps into copy and narration…even when there are no patriotic considerations, reporters often tend to lean to one side. There is no fixed pattern, but natural tendencies influence the best correspondents.” (Rosenblum Page 247)
This was especially true in the reporting of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In this war, we saw certain networks give incredibly biased reporting. On the other hand, CNN and Fox News made an obvious effort to move toward the middle of the political spectrum in an effort to be as fair as possible. In contrast to ABC and other networks, CNN and Fox News excelled in their coverage of the war. The Media Resource Center reported, “By refusing to copy the reflexive skepticism of most of the media elite, those who watched Fox News Channel weren’t misled by the unwarranted second-guessing and negativism that tainted other networks’ war news.” (Wright “Gulf War II”) The majority of the population agreed and tuned in, especially to Fox News. In fact, on Tuesday May 13th, the New York Times announced that, during the war, Fox News Channel “emerged as the most-watched source of cable news by far.” The New York Daily News also reported that, for the first time, Fox News drew the most viewers during a major breaking news event. (“Powerful Experience America Trusts”) Not everyone felt Fox was the best, most un-biased News Station, however. Speaking before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 25th Ted Turner, founder of CNN, called the founder of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, a “warmonger.” He accused Murdoch of promoting the war by hiring too many conservative reporters on Fox’s shows. (Media Research Center “Ted Turner”) On the flip side, many also consider Turner incredibly biased. As Sean Hannity writes in his book, Let Freedom Ring, Ted Turner is a “liberal loose cannon with a decidedly anti-Christian bent. Turner has called the Islamist extremist terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center ‘brave.’ He called Catholics on his own staff ‘Jesus freaks’ for observing Ash Wednesday. He mocked the Pope for being Polish. He said Christianity is ‘for losers.” (Hannity Page 257). Therefore, its no wonder that under Turner, CNN was often dubbed “Clinton’s News Network.”
However, although there has been question of CNN’s liberal bias and Fox’s conservative bias in the past, there was no evidence of that in the coverage of this war. A study performed by the Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at two signature nightly newscasts of both CNN and Fox News over nine days and concluded there was no noticeable difference. For example, in the number of stories on CNN’s News Night with Aaron Brown that talked about U.S. policy, 77% were completely supportive of the administration’s policy, without even a hint of dissent. The study also reported that on Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume, the numbers were also highly pro-administration, and most of the stories on this station were also unequivocally supportive of U.S. policy. This same study also found that over a larger period of time, Brit Hume’s Special Report on Fox stayed at a little over 50% fact, 30% analysis and only about 14% punditry. CNN was approximately the same, but varied from 38% fact, 22% punditry in November 2002, to 87% fact and 6% punditry in December. (“Return to Normalcy?”)
ABC, however, took a decidedly left-wing approach to its war coverage. As Ann Coulter states in her book Slander, “At ABC News, ‘conservative’ means the most conservative member of the Clinton Administration.” (Coulter Page 61) On April 23, 2003 the Media Resource Center gave the networks’ war coverage a report card. It gave Fox News an overall B, CBS a B-, NBC a C+, CNN a C+, and gave ABC the worst grade of all with an overall D-. It also gave individual anchors a grade. Brit Hume of Fox News Channel received an A, Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Dan Rather of CBS and Shepard Smith of Fox News each received a B+. Tom Brokaw received a B, Aaron Brown received a B- and Peter Jennings with ABC received an F. What caused the Media Resource Center to give ABC the worst grades of all the networks in the categories of both anchor quality and overall reporting? The answer is simple: bias. Some of this bias, such as that coming from Peter Jennings is bred deep within ABC’s past. A former co-worker of Jennings, Bob Zelnick, blatantly came out about Jennings’s bias after spending 21 years at ABC News with him. Zelnick even accused Jennings of changing scripts to “make them more liberal,” which he called the “Peter Factor.” (Morano) However, although many other networks have also had instances of biased reporters in the past, the past bias at ABC was only intensified during its coverage of the war on Iraq, making ABC clearly the most biased of all the cable network news stations.
In a report the Media Research Center published on April 23rd, 2003, it wrote, “ABC received a near-failing grade for knee-jerk negativism that played up Iraqi claims of civilian suffering, hyped American military difficulties, and indulged anti-war protestors with free air time. ABC’s Chris Cuomo even promoted anti-war protestors as ‘prescient indicators of the national mood,’ even as polls showed most Americans supported the war.” (Wright “Gulf War II”) ABC showed its disapproval of the war by covering every anti-war protest imaginable. It even covered those that all the other networks deemed entirely un-newsworthy. On February 26th, 2003, there was a “virtual protest” in which people sent e-mails, faxes, and phone calls to the Capital instead of marching in protest. Jennings made this protest seem much more important than it actually was. On the February 26th World News Tonight, Jennings exaggerated this “virtual protest” by saying, “In Washington today, thousands of people opposed to war against Iraq bombarded the Senate and the White House….communication was virtually paralyzed in the Senate for a while. Many congressional phone lines were jammed for several hours and one Senator reported 18 times more e-mail than usual.” (Media Resource Center “Only Jennings”) If this protest really were that large and important, the other networks would have undoubtedly reported it as well. However, neither the CBS nor the NBC evening news shows deemed it newsworthy.
ABC was also the only station to entirely ignore a pro-troops rally in New York City. CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC all covered part of the April 10th event live during the afternoon and later included it hourly in their short summaries of the day’s headlining events. The pro-troops rally featured New York Governor George Pataki and former Senator Bob Dole and stretched for several blocks north of the World Trade Center site. Police estimated the crowd at more than 15,000, but Jennings couldn’t bring himself to even briefly mention it on World News Tonight. According to the Media Resource Center, “Jennings couldn’t even find six seconds for the rally which took place just a few miles south of the ABC News headquarters, but he did find two minutes for a look at how an Iman in Detroit had a warning for the Bush administration. Jennings noted that in the Detroit suburbs Iraqis ‘are celebrating, but they also have a message for the Bush Administration.’” Would it really have been that difficult for Jennings to even briefly mention the rally in an effort to cover all aspects of the war? Also, with all the college protests going on, Jennings even complained that the college campuses around the country were too quiet. He bemoaned the inadequate level of college activism by saying, “The college campus appears rather quiescent to some – quiet.” (Media Resource Center “Only Jennings”)
While the war on Iraq lasted only about three weeks, it was a great military success, culminating with many jubilant Iraqis dancing in the streets. As General Tommy Franks stated on April 11th, Saddam Hussein and his cohorts were either dead or “running like hell.” (Wright “Gulf War II”) However, as the MRC reported, “According to ABC, America wasn’t just failing to win hearts and minds, but perhaps failing in the main military mission as well.” (Media Research Center “ABC Stresses U.S. Failures”) On April 9th, when US forces helped Iraqi civilians tip over the large statue of Saddam Hussein, Peter Jennings, who was anchoring ABC’s live coverage of the event, oddly remarked about the willingness of Saddam to pose so often. He then went on to focus on the statue more than the event itself by commenting on the fact that the sculptors who made such monuments would be out of work now that Iraq was liberated by Coalition Forces. He continued, “Saddam Hussein may have been, or may be, a vain man, but he has allowed himself to be sculpted heavy and thin, overweight and in shape, in every imaginable costume…the sculpting of Saddam Hussein, which has been a growth industry for 20 years, may well be a dying art.” (Baker and Noyes) If one had changed the channel to NBC, CBS, CNN or Fox News, he/she would have seen the anchors on those stations focusing on the fact that Iraqis were riding the head of Saddam’s statue through the streets of Baghdad in celebration. At ABC, however, Peter Jennings felt it more important to talk about the sculpting of the statue itself rather than admit that the US had accomplished such a great defeat. In fact, reporters on other stations were comparing the historical event to the fall of the Berlin Wall. This bias definitely led to one-sided reporting at ABC, and as Sean Hannity states in Let Freedom Ring, “It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that bias is leading directly to the demise of network news in this country.” (Hannity Page 257) Luckily for viewers, the networks employed a new tool in an effort to combat bias in the reporting of the Iraqi conflict: the Embedded Reporter.
The embedded reporter program was initiated by Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman after the military received a great deal of criticism for the lack of trust between the media and the military that has been developing for decades. This lack of trust intensified in Vietnam and was the cause of the extreme lack of media coverage allowed in the first Gulf War 12 years ago. In fact, the first Gulf War was criticized as being an almost media “blackout”. In Vietnam, reporters had “perhaps the greatest access of any war to date. They moved freely between centralized briefings and the battlefield, essentially embedding (though the term hadn’t been invented) for a few days at a time, with whatever unit they chose. (Marlantes) However, the military viewed the press as an enormous disaster, bringing the horrors of war home to Americans, and actually uncovering multiple discrepancies between what the military said, and what actually happened on the ground. Many in the military blamed the negative coverage for turning the public against the war effort. Some even concluded that this caused the loss of the war. As a result, no journalists were able to accompany the military in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. In fact, “Reporters who traveled to the island in boats were turned away at gunpoint.” (Kurtz “For Media After Iraq”) When the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989, the Pentagon promised to help reporters reach the country, but they ended up stranded in planes in Miami and Costa Rica and weren’t allowed in the country. As a result, there were no pictures or accounts of the battles on the first day which took the lives of 22 U.S. soldiers and left 265 wounded. When the First Gulf War began, the Pentagon actually declared an entire press blackout. Reporters had to rely on a “pool system”. The pool system consisted of a few embedded journalists who filed reports back to the press at large. Their reports often came days late, and their dispatches were often censored and sometimes even entirely blocked by the military. Embedded reporters were later used on an extremely limited basis in the war on Afghanistan, but only after most of the heavy fighting had ended. (Kurtz)
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military decided to try to patch the chasm that had built up between the press and the military by officially initiating the embedding program. In this war, almost 600 journalists volunteered and were sent to Iraq to cover the conflict. By definition, as embeds, reporters live with their assigned units 24 hours a day. They go through everything the rest of their unit goes through which makes being an embedded reporter far from easy. In fact, to prepare, the military sent many of the reporters to makeshift “boot camps” to train them for the war. As Andrew Jacobs, an embed for the New York Times accounted, “For a week in early February, a flabby brigade of 57 reporters, photographers, and network talking heads (9 of them women) gathered at the Quantico Marine Corps training base in Virginia, where we learned how to improve our chances of surviving a war with Iraq.” (Jacobs Section 6, Page 34) In his account, he goes on to describe how the prospective embeds were given crash courses in navigating with a compass, creating the perfect field latrine, and even things as gruesome as what to do if a comrade’s internal organs were to “spill out”. These training camps were also offered by the Pentagon at Georgia’s Fort Benning where “reporters and photographers climbed ropes, crawled on their bellies, lifted weights, and trekked for miles during rugged training.” Getting the embeds in shape for reporting was, in fact, so important than many newspapers, such as the San Antonio Express-News even hired personal trainers to help them “prepare for the rigors of war coverage.” (Ricchiardi)
There was just one other thing the prospective embeds had to do before they were mobilized to the battlefields. They had to sign a contract outlining the ground rules the Pentagon set forth. In the contract, they had to agree to give up their slots if they chose to leave for family emergencies or personal injuries. For this reason, not very many embeds chose to leave. As of April 4th, 2003 only 10 embeds pulled out because they knew their spots would not be there for them when they returned. (Strupp) In addition, the war coverage guidelines specified certain information that the press would not be able to release under any circumstances. For example, “media traveling with U.S. forces will be prohibited, during an operation, from reporting ‘specific information on friendly force troop movements, tactical deployment, and dispositions that would jeopardize operational security or lives…embargoes may be imposed to protect operational security (but) will only be used for operational security and will be lifted as soon as the operational security issue has passed.’” (Mitchell) In order to protect the soldiers, the guidelines also specified that, “Date time or location of previous conventional military missions and actions, as well as mission results are releasable only if described in general terms.” However, the document adds that “these ground rules recognize the right of the media to cover military operations and are in no way intended to prevent release of derogatory, embarrassing, negative, or uncomplimentary information.” (Mitchell)
This document also contains a warning to commanders not to bar reporters from battlefields for “personal reasons”. (Mnookin). This gave the embedded reporters almost absolutely undisturbed access to all aspects of the war. The document outlining ground rules even says that embedded media will be allowed to use priority inter-theater airlifts to cover and file stories, and will be given seats aboard vehicles, aircraft and naval ships to “allow maximum coverage of U.S. troops in the field.” (Mitchell) As the Los Angeles Times reported on May 3rd, 2003, an embedded reporter has an “exhilarating, if terrifying, window on the unscripted world of men in combat.” (Zucchino) As David Zucchino, an actual embed, reported after he returned the United States, “I saw what the soldiers saw…most important, I wrote stories that I could not have produced had I not been embedded – on the pivotal battle for Baghdad; the performance of U.S. soldiers in combat; the crass opulence of Hussein’s palaces; U.S. air strikes on an office tower in central Baghdad; souvenir-hunting by soldiers and reporters; and the discovery of more than $750 million in cash in a neighborhood that had been the preserve of top Iraqi officials.” He went on to discuss how he had never been refused an interview with any single soldier or officer. He was able to attend intelligence briefings, listen to radio communications during battles, and attend battle rehearsals where the angle of attack was laid out by commanding officers. (Zucchino) Like all other embedded reporters, he truly was given unprecedented access.
Because these embeds are actually part of the war, rather than just covering it, they are able to be the viewers’ eye sand ears in Iraq. However, some argue that this leads to biased journalism. According to the April 6th edition of the Los Angeles Times, there are essentially two major criticisms of embedding. One criticism, is that the embeds are “not just embedded but – inevitably – in bed with the military” providing coverage that helps the US government in its propaganda campaign. (Shaw, Part 5 Page 12). The other criticism of embeds is that they can only provide a limited view on the war and often are ignorant to the “big picture”. T. Sean Herbert, head of the CBS News analyst’s desk, addressed this first criticism. He said that embeds “couldn’t help but lose their objectivity” because they relied on the soldiers with whom they lived for their protection. “Embeds (and troops) became a band of brothers.” He went on to say that this relationship led to reporting that was “giddy and excited”. (Bartholomew) Herbert is right in his observation that the reporters formed close bonds with the soldiers. Most embeds said they felt very welcomed in their units, and that the troops were generally friendly to them. Ron Harris, an embed from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave an account of a meeting with the sergeant of the unit to which he was assigned. The sergeant said “Ron, when I heard you guys were coming, I was not happy, but you guys have been great.” Harris goes on to describe how the sergeant learned a lot about how journalists work, and what they’re like. From his work with the embeds, this sergeant, like many others, found his pre-conceived notions of the press to be false. As Chris Hanson, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland and a former Pentagon reporter stated, “This (embedding) was a very valuable experiment, in having the military…perhaps discover that reporters are people, too, and vice versa. I think this might help media-military relations in the future, and cut back on the mutual stereotyping that has been a problem for so long.” (Marlantes) Many embeds even ended up serving as a link between soldiers and their families back home. As the Christian Science Monitor observed, “families tracked the movements of their loved ones through the newspaper articles and TV reports, and many journalists were flooded with e-mails from family members, often asking them to communicate messages. Most reporters also loaned their satellite phones to enlistees for quick calls home.” (Marlantes) It is no doubt, therefore, that the embedding program did a great job of closing the chasm that developed between the military and the press during previous wars. Does this mean the relationship that developed between the military and the press led to pro-war bias as some have criticized?
Although the relationship inevitably led to some cases of bias, it was usually not the case. As viewers were able to see as the war coverage progressed, embedded reporters reported stories both favorable and unfavorable to the military. Reporting didn’t always follow what the Pentagon would have liked to have been reported, especially when things were going wrong. An example of a story unfavorable to the military is the story that William Branigin of the Washington Post filed early in April while embedded with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. Soldiers in that division said that they killed seven children and women in a car that failed to stop after the soldiers had given plenty of warning shots and commands. However, Branigin’s story quoted the man who ordered the warning shots, Captain Ronny Johnson, as saying “You just…killed a family because you didn’t fire a warning shot soon enough!” (Shaw Page 12) This is a story the military would have undoubtedly rather not had told because it shows the soldiers were actually at fault, but thankfully, because of the unprecedented access this embed had, the rest of the United States was able to hear the truth. Ann Scott Tyson, another embed with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, reported that the Army almost ran out of ammunition and food due to incredibly poor planning on the military’s part. (Marlantes) As another embed, NBC’s Chip Reid, reported, “We had total freedom to cover virtually everything we wanted to cover.” (“Embedded Reporters Liked it”). For this reason, most embeds were able to bring honest, truthful reporting to the networks. The fact that the embeds were right there on the frontlines also allowed them to be able to prove certain Pentagon claims. For example, as the architect of the embedding program, Bryan Whitman said, “It meant one thing for the Pentagon to deny an Iraqi spokesman’s claim that coalition forces weren’t in Baghdad; quite another when Fox News Channel aired that spokesman on a split screen with reporter Greg Kelly riding a tank on a city street.” (“Embedded Reporters Liked it”). These are just a few examples of how the embedded reporters were able to bring truth about the war, both good and bad, home.
While critics complain that most of the
reports from embeds were too positive, it is possible that this is just due to
the fact that the war went so well for the U.S. and was over so quickly. In fact, a study by the Project for
Excellence in Journalism published on April 3rd, 2003 found that “in
contrast to many breaking news stories, when TV coverage is marked by
speculation and misleading accounts, 93.5 percent of the stories filed by
embedded correspondents in the war’s first week were factual.” The other 6.5 percent of reporting was 1.9
percent analysis, only .9 percent opinion and 3.7 percent commentary. This conclusion came after the group studied
40 hours of reports from embeds during the morning and evening newscasts of
CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and Fox News. The
group
further concluded that “Americans seem far better served by having the embedding system than they were from more limited press pools during the Gulf War of 1991 or only halting access to events in Afghanistan.” (Kurtz “Front Line Reports”)
Fact 93.5 Analysis 1.9 Opinion .9 Commentary 3.7
Perhaps the reason why most embeds offered such good
reporting was that the great majority of their reports were live. Live reports accounted for 49.1 percent of
all embedded accounts versus 12.1 percent live with audio only, 11.1 percent
combination,
Level of Reporting
Live 49.1 Live (audio only) 12.1 Combination 11.1 Recorded and Taped 27.8 Total 100
and 27.8 percent recorded
and taped. (“Embedded Reporters:
Embedded Reports
What are Americans getting?”) This means that there was less
time for embeds to add their own spin and bias to the report.
Instead, they were forced to report exactly what they were seeing and what was happening, on the spot, usually with minimal bias.
As far as the second criticism of embeds not being able to see the “big picture”, many conceded that their perspective was, in fact, limited. ABC’s Don Dahler, embedded with the 101st Airborne Division said that he “certainly did not get a clear picture of the war because we were so isolated. My job was to look at things through a microscope, not the binoculars.” (Kurtz “For Media After Iraq”) However, while this is a problem that still needs a little more work, overall, it really did not hurt the quality of reporting that came from the embeds in Iraq. This is partly due to the fact that the press as a whole tried to correct for the problem by complementing embeds with so-called “unilateral reporters” that could move freely from military unit to military unit. These “unilaterals” were usually able to shed light on what the embeds missed and put the “big picture” together for viewers at home. As Edith M. Lederer, a veteran AP reporter and the AP’s current chief United Nations correspondent stated, “the practice of embedding reporters, which dominated the coverage of the current war, was far from perfect but much better than the ‘military censorship’ that reporters faced during the first Gulf War in 1991.” (Bartholomew)
When the Media Resource Center
released its report card for network war coverage, it praised NBC’s David Bloom
and his Bloommobile as being the star of the embedded reporters by providing
hours of riveting live coverage of the Third Infantry’s journey to reach
Baghdad. It also praised CNN’s Walter
Rodgers because of his hours of narration under enemy fire and the way he never
strayed from his “just the facts style”.
Greg Kelly of Fox News Channel rounded out the Media Resource
Center’s list of the top three embedded reporters. (Wright “Gulf War II”).
Only time will tell if the embedded reporter program can completely revolutionalize reporting. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, however, the program did a great job of minimizing bias on network news stations. Not only did the embedded reporters bring a form of honest reporting that has been lacking in past conflicts, but they also dramatically improved the relationship between the military and the media that has been tarnished ever since Vietnam. As Robert Pritchard, a professor at Ball State University stated, “The embedded reporter program stands to dramatically improve the credibility of the individual soldier, sailor, airman, Marine and Coast Guardsman. It also improves the credibility of the military with the media and public.” (Pritchard, Page 1-2). Although it is true that reports from embeds sometimes focus on individual battles rather than the larger picture of the war as a whole, the general public should be grateful to have such a radical new program that gives unprecedented opportunities for access to these battles. As CBS News President Andrew Heyward stated, “This is going to change American war coverage forever. The alternative – lack of access – is clearly far worse. People got to see the human side of war in a way that really hasn’t happened since Vietnam.” Victoria Clarke the spokesperson for the Pentagon agrees and said that she “sees no reason to abandon the embedding process in a future war.” (Kurtz) British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also praised embedded reporters by commending them for their “invaluable service of reporting solid, factual coverage of the conflict.” He continued that the “benefits of hour by hour and day by day reporting from the front line far outweigh the disadvantages.” (“Straw praises war reporters”) Hopefully, in the future, the fact that the embedding program improved press-military relations will lead to even more access available to reporters, which in turn, will result in even better overall war coverage.
Works
Cited
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