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A year later, TV's embedded reporters ponder the merits of how they covered the 'drive-by war' by V 
From Newsday, 18 March 2004 Back from the front - A year later, TV's embedded reporters ponder the merits of how they covered the 'drive-by war' BY VERNE GAY STAFF WRITER March 18, 2004 A year ago today, ABC News "embed" Mike Cerre was poised on the Iraqi border with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Division - or "Fox 2/5" in military shorthand - and about to become one of the few and the proud to change television history. But 34 years ago, when Cerre (pronounced sir-RAY) was a member of a Marine reconnaissance unit that flew out of Da Nang, Vietnam, the 23-year-old lieutenant would occasionally run into a brash young CBS News recruit "with a big 'fro and military fatigue shirt" who would become famous someday but was then merely a nuisance. Ed Bradley had a tiresome habit of hanging around the base perimeter in hopes of getting some Marine to tell him about the next mission, recalls Cerre, now in San Francisco for ABC. But he was "not to be spoken to or dealt with and avoided as much as possible." Certainly, nothing personal with enterprising Bradley, whom the GIs respected. But orders were still orders: Stay away from the hated press. Enemies become allies That it would take another war and an act by the Department of Defense to ease this long, rancorous feud is an irony not lost upon Cerre and the other 192 TV embeds who gave viewers an often spectacular, often frightening, front-row seat to a war that raged over 22 days last March and April. The embed program was a Pentagon plan designed to reverse the military's preconception that TV and print press was an enemy to be avoided, stonewalled and (if all else failed) ignored. The idea was simple: If Saddam Hussein's regime was well-practiced in the art of disinformation, then why not bring along independent observers as a countermeasure? So 550 reporters from around the world went into the thick of battle with American and British troops. Over three weeks, the TV embeds would file hundreds of hours of reports, from the stunning battlefield footage of CNN's Walter Rodgers to the exhilarating work of NBC's David Bloom. Viewers had never seen anything like it. No doubt, they hope never to see anything like it again. The plan not only worked spectacularly well, say supporters, but yielded side benefits never even contemplated. "It really did enable you to establish a level of trust in both directions, and I must say that the afterglow of that has lasted," says ABC News' Ted Koppel, who was on the air for dozens of hours while he and a crew accompanied the 3rd Infantry Division. "I now feel that I have a number of, if not close personal friends, then at least good friends, from Gen. [Buford] Blount on down." Good for both Reflecting the sentiment among each of the networks, CBS News President Andrew Heyward hailed the venture. "You can't fall into the trap [of thinking] that although it was good for the Pentagon, it was bad for journalists. Sometimes, those aren't mutually exclusive." One immediate criticism of TV embedding was that it provided a "soda straw" view of the war, devoid of context, perspective or the Iraqi side. But, notes Heyward, "if this was looking through straws, then before we had to be looking through toothpicks." However, what TV didn't "do enough of," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, "was to take all of the soda straws together and give some sort of perspective, particularly on morning news and cable news. You would get one person's embedded report and what you didn't see was someone taking the elements of three reports and putting together a nuanced and multitiered look at the day's events." One usually tough critic of broadcast journalism was positive about the experiment. "I'm hard-pressed to remember anything out of the embeds which seemed to me particularly egregious," says Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. "I was much more critical of what was going on with [network] headquarters' commentary, which got into the celebratory shock- and-awe thing." Nevertheless, the unprecedented alliance between TV and the military unfolded in innumerable ways hardly anyone could have imagined. Lai Ling Jew, an NBC News producer embedded with the 101st Airborne, was asked to speak at the funeral of Command Sgt. Maj. Jerry Lee Wilson of Thomson, Ga., who was killed in Mosul. "To contemplate that he was someone you know [who] would be willing to give his life to save yours was a hard pill," says the "Dateline" producer, her voice still betraying the emotional impact of his death a year later. "Not many people knew what his final months were, so I was in this difficult position of explaining what life was like for him and what he was thinking about. It was a strange responsibility for a journalist, to say the least, but an honor." The "overarching lesson" of the embed program, says Bryan Whitman, deputy spokesman for the Defense Department and one of the program's architects, "is that the military and the media can work together on a large scale in a framework that allows each of them to accomplish their professional goals." Nevertheless, give reporters a year to think about something, and they will discover problems. Trouble for unilaterals A big complaint, then and now, focuses on the military treatment of the so-called "unilaterals," reporters who were not embedded with a military unit. Without military protection, some TV unilaterals "obviously had a bad war," says CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan, or were shut out, including CBS' Lara Logan, whose bosses ordered her out of Baghdad just before shock-and-awe began (she would later return to report on the city's fall). Logan recently embedded with a military unit in Afghanistan for a "60 Minutes 2" story but decided against embedding during the Iraq war because "it's hugely important that there are independent outside witnesses to what happened in a situation so that you don't just have the U.S. military or the Iraqis putting out their own side." Logan adds that "undoubtedly, the embeds were a huge success, particularly from the U.S. military point of view. When you're embedded with troops, you bond with those soldiers on the ground and gain respect for what they do [and] that undoubtedly affects the way you report." But how objective were TV embeds, who depended entirely on the military for food, shelter, transportation and - of course - protection? By war's end, the question "embed or in bed?" had become a cliche, but even now, there is little evidence that TV embeds censored themselves or were censored by their handlers. Every TV embed can cite an example of a story that made Pentagon bureaucrats wince (most of them friendly-fire incidents that got on the air). A major drawback Nevertheless, TV embeds - with few exceptions - didn't have their own vehicles and couldn't get out to report on casualties or other developing stories. When the troops moved, they moved too, leading one TV reporter to call Iraq a "drive-by war." Don Dahler, ABC News' embed with the 101st Airborne and with the "Stryker Brigade" of the 2nd Infantry Division in January, says "the major drawback was mobility," and "it really hindered our story coverage in a lot of ways. ... When stories were tantalizingly close, you couldn't get to them, like a village where you really wanted to go back and find out what the experience of the people was." And what embeds didn't see, viewers back home didn't see, either. "Was embedding successful?" asks ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff (1st Marine Division, 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion). "Yes, but the big test is whether the Pentagon will do this again in another war. If the Pentagon doesn't step in and allow this kind of access again, then history will judge this as a propaganda campaign. If they do, then the embedded program in the Iraq war will be the beginning of a new kind of reporting. "But I have to tell you," he added, "I'm skeptical." So what about the future? NBC's Kerry Sanders, who was embedded with the Marines, says he recently got a call from "someone doing a study for the Department of Defense who said they were doing an analysis of how to improve [embedding]. It's good they're doing the follow-up, but it's inevitable that they change or tweak it, and from my perspective, it doesn't need it." The Pentagon's Whitman responds: "I like to think of us as a growing institution, and we have certainly grown from this. But I won't be Pollyannaish." Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc. |