"Embedding" hampered Iraq media independence -book 30 Jan 2004 11:19:44 GMT
"Embedding" hampered Iraq media independence -book
By Kate Holton
LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Large sections of the mainstream media became too close to the military in Iraq and as a result produced "cheerleading" coverage which lacked credibility, according to a book published this week.
"Tell Me Lies", which looked at coverage of the conflict and the impact of the over 500 "embedded" journalists, said the dependency that developed between the military and the media often resulted in one-sided reports.
"Dreamt up by the Pentagon and (Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld, the "embeds"... were almost completely controlled by the military," the book's producer David Miller said.
"The aim... was to control what is reported by encouraging journalists to identify with their units. To eat and drink together, to risk danger and to share the same values."
Media analysts, while saying it was wrong to generalise on the standard of reporting, agreed that some sections of the media had become too close to their units.
"Some of the stuff, particularly on television, was straight out of Hollywood," ex-war reporter and professor of Journalism Colin Bickler told Reuters. "It's always very difficult to be critical when you are with people."
But Bickler also defended the use of embedding, saying it regularly provided information that would have otherwise been missed.
The book, written by up to 40 journalists and commentators, said competition between the different media organisations resulted in journalists often reporting the military line before having time to question it.
Christopher Hill, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, told Reuters that over a long period of time, the slow drip of familiarity with soldiers and their way of looking at the world would inevitably breed a certain empathy.
"Whether this was an absolutely conscious and manipulative strategy on the part of the government or simply a highly intelligent way of handling the inevitable problem that journalists would want access is a matter of judgement," he said.
After tightly curbing media access to military operations in Grenada, the 1991 Gulf War and Afghanistan, the Pentagon agreed on an unprecedented scale to let journalists accompany front-line soldiers to get a clearer picture of the conflict.
It said both sides would benefit from the agreement, with journalists getting a much truer picture of the army and soldiers having a better idea of how they were perceived.
The move was also seen as a way of counteracting the coverage produced by satellite stations such as Qatar-based Al Jazeera which was expected to be critical of the United States and Britain.
David Kellner, writing in the book, said the U.S. networks tended to show highly sanitised clips of the war with few Iraqi casualties which resulted in a "view...totally different from that shown in other parts of the world".
Former British war reporter Martin Bell was quoted as saying the use of sanitised shots left viewers with a sense that the conflict was a relatively cost-free enterprise and an acceptable way of settling differences.
"People have to be left with some sense of what happened, if only through the inclusion of pictures sufficiently powerful at least to hint of the horror of those excluded," Bell said.
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