Coulda Been an Actor, but

Coulda Been an Actor, but I Wound Up Here - Controversy about the Embedded Reporter program - among the media:

As Slate's Jack Shafer puts it: "Embed reports from the front are mostly variations on the themes 'Hey, I'm still alive!' and 'Hey, those Iraqis are extremely dead! ' which must warm the hearts of the chain of command." Magazine columnist Roger Simon says the TV reports are all about star power, "celebrities like David Bloom riding in that M-88 tank recovery vehicle."

[Ironically, some military leaders are critical of the embedded journalist program because reports from the field don't always square with official assessments.]

There lies the rub; a good reporter draws flak from both sides. But it's not just the reporter in the field that's supposed to be doing the job - the staff back at the Network or Newspaper or Wire Service need to do their job as well.

Back in World War II, war correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Walter Cronkite lived among the troops - Cronkite parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne on D-Day. Pyle died among the soldiers he covered, shot by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima. Some of the best reporters - Andy Rooney and cartoonist Bill Mauldin - actually were soldiers, working for GI publications. Did their "objectiity" or detachment suffer in the process?

The article addresses this:

No one denies that journalists who eat and sleep with the people they cover tend to form bonds, not unlike those forged in the traveling bubble of a presidential campaign. The feelings are even more intense when unarmed journalists must depend on heavily armed soldiers to protect them from enemy fire. But they fervently maintain that they are there to do a job.

"I did not and still do not buy into the notion that proximity necessarily influences coverage," says ABC correspondent Ron Claiborne, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. "In all honesty, I do not believe I would in any sense 'let up' on a story on this ship because I may happen to like the admiral or the captain or anyone else.

"I do not deny that reporters sometimes go easy on someone they like -- or go hard on someone they don't. That's human nature. But I do not think that living among the people we are covering undermines our putative objectivity."

Glenn Reynolds led his piece on this story with with this quote - challenging the reader to guess who the speaker is:

"Let them try not showering for a week, sleeping out in the desert, living through sandstorms, being under fire -- I don't see these people out there. All they do is criticize."

A cranky GI? No - CBS' John Roberts, with the First Marine Division.

Posted by Mitch at March 31, 2003 08:00 AM