Shot In The Dark: Up Front

November 26, 2004

Up Front

For all the criticism of the Embedded Reporter program that's happened in the two weeks since the shooting of a wounded insurgent by a US Marine (most of it misguided), the program continues to be a source of some great journalism, in the best tradition of Ernie Pyle.

Greg Palkot of Fox News' "Reporters Notebook" covers the Fallujah assault, and covers it memorably, tying the big picture to the view from within a single platoon in the Fifth Marine Regiment.

We'd seen our share of "Shock and Awe" (the air, artillery and tank barrage as the Marines entered Fallujah (search) was nothing short of a modern-day Dante's "Inferno"). We'd gone along and watched as Marines blasted in doors, scaled walls and turned up weapons and weapon-toters — the blood-thirsty terrorists that this mission was all about.
But again, it took until that Thursday for the difficulty of this campaign to sink in. That's when we watched as Lance Cpl. Clayton South was carried out on a stretcher from a house in the northwestern section of the city.

Calls for the abolition of the Embedded Reporter program are very premature. We are in the middle of creating a generation of reporters and producers that view our servicepeople as actual humans, something that's been missing from our "elite" media since World War II. That's important.

Posted by Mitch at November 26, 2004 01:47 PM | TrackBack

Comments

I agree that it is too early to look at ending the Embedded Reporter program... with one possible change, that being an end to pool video feeds.
The recent case of Kevin Sites and the marine shooting is instructive. In my opinion Sites behaved very responsibly. I have been impressed by him in the past, especially on Charlie Rose when he blasted the EU and UN for doing nothing about the Sudan (and in the past for Kosova, Rwanda, etc. etc. etc.), and praised the Bush administration for at least being willing to use the word genocide and turn up the pressure on the Sudanese government. One big problem, though, is that any video someone like Sites shoots is pledged to a pool, and we can be certain that many recipients and transmitters of the video will not broadcast it responsibly.
The other problem with the Embedded Reporter program is more an endemic problem with the MSM as a whole. The BIG story is the POSSIBLY suspect behavior of one marine, in a city full of torture chambers and mass graves. The embedded reporters seem to do a good job of putting things in context, but the MSM as a whole does not.

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