Facilitated news as controlled information flows: The origins, rationale and dilemmas of ‘embedded’ journalism

Abstract

The article traces the origins, rationale and some of the dilemmas that have emerged in the practice of ‘embedded’ journalism. It argues that the practice emerged as a post-Vietnam response by the US military to the ‘problem’ of independent news coverage of conflicts in which the US was involved. For the post-Vietnam US military, independent news coverage was problematic because it often contradicts the official war narrative and, if left unhindered, undermines public support for the war effort. Since public support is crucial for success in a foreign war, particularly during lengthy engagements, independent news coverage is seen as a threat to the unity of the home front and therefore a threat to the war effort itself. The lesson learned from Vietnam was to restrict independent media access to battle zones, first by denying all access and withdrawing security guarantees to journalists operating in conflict theatres, and then by providing privileged but controlled access to front line units via the practice of facilitated news-gathering known as ‘embedded journalism’. As it turns out, even that practice has a downside, and there is more to the story than the military desire to control the narrative.

Full text

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ABSTRACT
7. Facilitated news as controlled
information ows: The origins,
rationale and dilemmas of
‘embedded’ journalism.
The article traces the origins, rationale and some of the dilemmas that
have emerged in the practice of ‘embedded’ journalism. It argues that the
practice emerged as a post-Vietnam response by the US military to the
‘problem’ of independent news coverage of conicts in which the US was
involved. For the post-Vietnam US military, independent news coverage
was problematic because it often contradicts the ofcial war narrative and,
if left unhindered, undermines public support for the war effort. Since public
support is crucial for success in a foreign war, particularly during lengthy
engagements, independent news coverage is seen as a threat to the unity
of the home front and therefore a threat to the war effort itself. The lesson
learned from Vietnam was to restrict independent media access to battle
zones, rst by denying all access and withdrawing security guarantees to
journalists operating in conict theatres, and then by providing privileged
but controlled access to front line units via the practice of facilitated
news-gathering known as ‘embedded journalism’. As it turns out, even
that practice has a downside, and there is more to the story than the military
desire to control the narrative.
Keywords: conict reporting, embedded journalism, facilitated news,
independent news, objectivity, propaganda, war correspondence
PAUL G. BUCHANAN
Security analyst, Auckland

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THE RESPONSE to the ‘problem’ of independent news gathering
in conict zones in which the US military was engaged was rst
elaborated during the Reagan administration. It was honed and
perfected in different ways during subsequent decades of ghting by
Democratic and Republican governments, but the overall trend was towards
increased control of information ows. What they have in common is the
break with past journalistic practice. Historically, military correspondents
are soldiers, representatives of major news outlets or independent string-
ers. Although the specics have varied, the rst are uniformed personnel
who report in the military press or who act as ‘in house’ correspondents
for commerical media, the second are accredited reporters with access to
military briengs and movements, and the third are unafliated individuals
who follow and sometimes accompany troops into battle but are not
permanently attached to any particular unit or news agency.
Embedded journalists are something else. They are media gures that
have received an explicit invitation to join troops on a cohabitating basis for
relatively extended periods of time. They live, patrol and often come under
re with the units that they are assigned to, so that, the argument goes, they
may better understand the totality of the soldiering experience in a foreign
combat zone (Pfau et. al., 2004, pp. 74-76).
That privileged access comes at a price, and that price is not written in any
press guidance issued by the US Department of Defense or other militaries
that have adopted the practice. Embedded journalists are often selected based
upon the relationship their media employer has with the inviting government
or the military as well as their individual propensity to support ‘the troops’
whom they depend on for their care and welfare while in combat zones. The
relationship is symbiotic. Embedded media get access to front and back line
action while the military gets a sympathetic public depiction of its endeavours.
Current media industry practices facilitate the use of controlled news sourcing
by focusing on the embedded reporter’s story and those of the troops with
which the reporter is embedded rather than the military context in which they
operate. The reporter becomes both protagonist and narrator in the ultimate
reality show. The terms and conditions to which the embedded reporters agree
preclude critical scrutiny of potentially negative impact of the combat expe-
rience on innocents and ensure that the journalistic narrative conforms to the
military’s preferred interpretation of events. In effect, there are both push and

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pull factors at play in the rise of embedded journalism: the military pull to
control the news ow at the same time that there is a push for ratings-driven
reality programming in the corporate news media.
Withdrawal of security guarantees for independent journalists and
termination without warning of embedded status for reporters who violate
the terms and conditions of the facilitated news contract provide strong
physical disincentives to engage in non-sanctioned and uncontrolled report-
ing in combat zones. For example, in 2004 the ‘embed’ credentials of two
Virginia-based journalists were revoked because they photographed and ran
a story about a bullet-ridden Humvee they had seen in Kuwait. This effec-
tively left them defenceless in a war zone where they had no local contacts
or alternative security provision. The dangers of embedding exist even with
security guarantees in place, and serve a useful purpose for the facilitating
entity. A contrary incident such as an embedded reporter’s or accompany-
ing soldier’s death or injury suits the military narrative as to the unsavoury
character of the adversary and the risks to the soldiers involved in ghting
the ‘good’ ght (such as bringing freedom to oppressed people against their
will). Sympathetic and de-contextualised coverage of contrary events serve
to make real the immediate costs to the ‘good’ team and re-emphasises the
need for public support for their sacrice in what otherwise might seen as a
distant and seemingly inconsequential, meaningless or futile conict (since no
modern conict involving the US has seen its core national security interests
at stake). Strategic breadth is sacriced in order to achieve tactical depth and
immediacy in reporting (Cockburn, 2010).
Facilitated news provision such as that embodied in the concept of
embedded journalism can serve propaganda purposes—and often is no more
than that—but it is not reducible to it. Propaganda is the direct transmission
of ideologically supportive messages from the State to target audiences (both
domestic and foreign). Here there is an intervening variable—the embedded
journalist, presenting war from his or her personal perspective. For similar
reasons embedded journalists are more than mere public relations (PR) acks.
A better way to look at embedded reporting is as a weapon in the informa-
tion war that runs parallel to combat. As a US military spokeman phrased it,
‘Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we
are going to attempt to dominate the information environment. Embedding
journalists honorably served that end’ (Kahn, 2004).

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As part of its information warfare strategy (itself a component part of
larger psychological operations (PSYOPS) campaigns), the military may use
journalists as third party transmission belts, ampliers or echo chambers for
the State-supportive message, where the message remains unaltered by the
messenger. But embedded journalists are free to write the specic narrative
for the events they are covering, using as a general guideline the unwrit-
ten understandings and formal protocols undertaken in order to secure the
embedded assignment. Within those formal and informal guidelines the
reporter can emphasise aspects of the story as he or she sees t so long as it
conforms to the broad objectives of the military command and the rules of
engagement governing the embedding process. In this sense they act not so
much as direct transmission belts for State ideology or PR agents but more
as what Lenin referred to as ‘useful fools’ of the military apparatus: well-
meaning and sympathetic actors that disguise the controlled or manipulated
aspect of the embedded perspective by interjecting their own thoughts and
words into the story line.
The beauty of embedded journalism is in the synergies produced by the
overlapping interests of security forces and news outlets: each gets to convey
its own particular message of legitimate effort and real-time involvement
in mutually reinforcing fashion without delving into the circumstances and
ethics involved in the larger context into which journalists are embedded.
The reporter burnishes his credentials as a war correspondent, the media
employer reafrms its privileged access to sources of power and the military
frames the representation of conict in narrowly constructed, sympathetic
terms (Ricchiardi, 2003). The audience is entertained while empathising
with the plight of the troops and reafrming its loathing of an enemy abroad
that seeks to do them harm (even if that enemy is ghting on its own soil
in defence of its sovereignty and national identity). In this fashion the war
narrative is controlled, contrived, manipulated and sanitised in the interests
of corporate and governmental elites far removed from the conicts in which
the ‘reporting’ occurs.
A brief history of facilitated newsgathering in modern US warfare
The Vietnam War taught the US many lessons, but the lessons learned were
not necessarily those that one might suspect. Rather than recognise the
advantages the irregular combatant has when waging protracted guer-
rilla warfare on home soil, the US military learned that its technological

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superiority in weaponry and long-distance logistics was fatally undermined
by a lack of popular support at home. Instead of re-examining its approach
to unconventional warfare as both a kinetic and political exercise and the
rationales behind ‘asymmetric’ combat that negated technological superior-
ity in the irregular battle space, the post-1975 US military determined that
a major source of popular discontent with the war was independent journal-
ists, particularly video journalists, reporting on aspects of conict that were
unattering to the US military or which cast the military effort in a negative
light. The photographs of the napalm bombing of Trang Bang and reporting
of the Mai Lai massacre (both of which won Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism)
were used as examples of how such unfettered reporting undermined troop
morale and popular support by casting the US military as villains rather than
as saviours. In addition, this type of reporting during the 1968 Tet offensive
contributed to the decision by Walter Cronkite, then the US’s pre-eminent
television news anchor, to announce on a primetime national newscast that
the war was lost (even though the Tet offensive was a tactical victory for the
US and South Vietnamese), something that expanded domestic opposition to
the war beyond its radical youth origins.
The immediate solution to the problem of independent journalism was
to exclude it. War zones are dangerous places, so the US military adopted
a policy in the 1980s of not guaranteeing journalists’ safety in combat zones,
even if these were behind front lines. This included accredited journalists and
independent ‘stringers’. Instead, they were advised to steer clear of direct
reporting of front-line combat and to attend briengs hosted by the military
commands involved. This is a practice long familiar to correspondents who
understand the vicissitudes of the front lines (that is, bullets can y anywhere)
and therefore prefer to report on what the military command provides in the
way of after-action reports and battleeld summaries. During the 1982-83
Lebanon conict, the 1988 invasion of Granada, the 1989 invasion of Panama,
the 1991 Gulf War, the 1993-94 Haiti intervention and the 2001 invasion of
Afghanistan, the US military informed news outlets that it could not provide
them with security and hence access to conict zones (Zeide, 2005, p. 1314).
Active duty (uniformed) photographers and correspondents covered the
action from within assigned military units while civilian journalists were
left to rely on military briengs away from the front lines or on staged tours
of them, on second hand reports from civilians or soldiers after the fact,

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or to risk unauthorised forays into combat zones in which they could well be
misidentied as ‘hostiles’ by US forces.
Amid questions about the constitutionality of the exclusion orders, major
US news outlets complained about the lack of access even as foreign indepen-
dent journalists assumed the risks historically associated with war correspon-
dence and reported directly from the eld without the benet of US military
protection (this was less true of Grenada and Panama, where the US was
able to prevent independent journalists from entering the countries after the
initial invasion). Yet in a perverse way the dangers of independent reporting,
coupled with the denial of access to US military units involved in combat, set
the stage for the practice of journalistic embedding in military units (some call
it ‘imbedding’, as ‘in bed with’). The concept of preferential but controlled
media access developed in parallel to another journalistic development, which
when combined with media demands for battleeld access and technological
innovations transformed into the practice of embedded journalism.
During the 1990s, US journalists were granted increased access to political
campaigns and elected ofcials. Presidential press conferences increased in
frequency, reporters travelled with candidates during their campaigns rather
than report from selected stops along the way, C-Span was launched and
ourished. This ‘real-time’ form of political reporting proved very protable
for media outlets, which could demonstrate their access and ability to shape
a candidate’s or politician’s image based upon the extent and type of such
access. Candidates, in turn, saw value in presenting themselves as ‘real’ peo-
ple in ‘unguarded’ moments, so both sides benetted from the arrangement.
Developments in the media world also shaped the approach to war corres-
pondents. In the late 1970s, as Rupert Murdoch extended his media holdings
into the US with the launch of the rst Fox channel, the concept of ‘reality
TV’ began to dominate television ratings. Starting with the still-running show
Cops, in which TV crews accompany local police on patrols in dozens of US
cities, passing through a variety of MTV ‘reality’ shows and moving to entire
channels dedicated to reality (some might call it voyeur) programming such
as True TV and the appropriately named Escandalo (Scandal) TV for Hispanic
audiences, the US television medium has become dominated by seemingly
non-scripted or lightly scripted shows featuring ‘real’ people doing ‘real’
things, some of which are actually live or real-time in nature. Not surprisingly,
with growing popular demand for ‘reality’ came media interest in showing the

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reality of conict on a real-time, rst person, ‘raw’ basis. Yet with regard to
war coverage, the standing post-Vietnam rules governing journalistic access
to the US military engaged in conict zones ran directly counter to such a
project, and instead promoted highly scripted second-hand, time delayed and
heavily ltered military descriptions of events (the classic instances of this
being the coverage of the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, which was essentially
stage-managed by the US Central Command and Department of Defense).
The growth of internet-based news collection compounded the push of
reality programming on corporate news organisations. As internet-based
sources of information grew and published unvarnished accounts of pretty
much anything (some factual, some not), corporate print and television ratings
declined as audiences shifted their preferences to the ‘new’ media, many of
which ran stories that did not conform to governmental or corporate dictates.
This shift in audience preferences ran along generational lines, with youth
leading the move to new media technologies. That foresaw an inevitable
negative effect on corporate media prots as youth looked elsewhere for ‘raw’
news and as adults continued to use those alternative sources as the mainstays
of their personal information stream.
Faced with the downturn in audience and readership numbers, corporate
media began to adopt some of the alternative news dissemination formats
such as web logs. But the major response was to cut the number of dedicated
reporters assigned to specic subject areas such as war correspondence, as this
was the easiest managerial solution to the declining rate of news-derived prot.
Many of those made redundant were the most experienced (and hence
expensive) journalists in corporate media stables, who were replaced by
inexperienced and often non-journalist ‘talking heads’ whose role was to look
good, become famous and therefore add reality ‘bite’ to whatever story line
they were covering. The trouble was that the new type reporters often had
no understanding of warfare or were reluctant to engage the personal risks
involved in genuine war correspondence. Hence the invitation to embed with
military units provided them with an opportunity to enhance their following
while seemingly developing an understanding of combat without facing the
risks of independent journalists (even if the embedding situation offered more
of a false sense of security rather than an absolute guarantee of it). In effect,
facilitated access was granted not so much on prior credentials but on the
basis of who reporters worked for, which suited the interests of the military,
corporate media managers and individual journalists involved.

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Confronted by pressures to relax its ‘no access’ rule in a downsized
corporate media climate that increasingly relied on reality programming for
prots and celebrity reporting of news, the Pentagon began to consider alter-
native ways of facilitating news coverage that would not undermine military
missions or popular support for them. This complemented ongoing US military
cooperation with Hollywood, where movies such as Top Gun and Clear and
Present Danger proved mutually protable for studios and military recruit-
ing alike. The military wanted to extend this good working relationship to
other mediums, and embedding journalists from major news media outlets is
a good way of doing so.
Trial runs using reporters travelling with US military units in the 1991
Gulf War proved very good as a form of public relations exercise, leading to
the controlled inclusion of reporters along with US military and Coast Guard
units undertaking low-intensity conict tasks such as anti-narcotics operations
and drug interdiction missions. The early experience with embedding report-
ers was positive from a military standpoint, as the coverage of the military
operations against identiable and unqualied enemies (such as drug dealers
or Saddam Hussein) was generally favourable. Embedded journalists did
appear to gain a better understanding of the reality of military life and achieved
better depth of knowledge of what military operations, if not actual combat,
entailed. To this was added the positive experience of embedded reporters
during the Falklands War, where British correspondents reporting alongside
(and completely dependent on) their troops developed close attachments to the
units to which they were seconded, thereby contributing to positive coverage
of the re-conquest of the islands (Misker et. al., 2003, p. 9).
Improvements in telecommunications technologies and miniaturisation
of audio-visual equipment also made it easier for journalists to report di-
rectly from the eld, lessening their dependence on support crews and xed
logistics lines. This played into the equation: A reporter, his or her cameras
and computer, and a military unit = direct information from the battle zone
(although on any given day battleeld reporting still remains subject to home
ofce editorial whims that may favour celebrity scandal over bloodshed in a
foreign country).
The military can argue with justication that the evolution of warfare
from xed line, conventional front engagements to more amorphous ‘shadow’
conicts involving irregular combatants and unconventional tactics, coupled
with the increased lethality of both high and low technology weaponry, made

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it essential for their own safety that journalists embed with military units. This
turned out to be true in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where kidnappings and
killings of foreign journalists by insurgent forces became standard practice. By
agreeing to the quid pro quo involved in the construct (safety for sympathy),
embedded journalists increased their rapport with the troops and commanders
who facilitated their reporting, thereby opening doors to ongoing command-
level briengs and one-on-one interviews with senior military gures. Even
so, the facilitation of news coverage via embedded journalism was limited in
the latter 1990s to low-risk environments rather than serious combat. This pre-
cluded real-time coverage of US military operations in places like Somalia (of
Blackhawk Down fame), in Latin America (in counter-insurgency operations)
or special operations against Serbian forces in Kosovo or Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The practice of limiting independent journalist access to US forces in
combat continued after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. Early coverage
of the ght against the Taliban was notable because of the lack of US-based
reporting of it, with an array of non-US journalists (including at least one New
Zealander) risking life and limb to cover key moments in the struggle such as
the siege at Mazer e-Sharif and the bombing of Tora Bora.
By 2003, the long build-up to the invasion of Iraq brought with it a
comprehensive programme for embedding journalists in US military units.
Crafted by Pentagon comunications chief and former public relations execu-
tive Victoria Clark, guidelines were drawn up by the Central Command (the
military command responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia) and
approved by the Ofce of the Secretary of Defense in what became ofcial US
policy (US Secretary of Defense, 2003). Given its ideological predilections
and support for the George W. Bush administration, Fox News was given pride
of place in the embedding process, with such as retired USMC Lt. Colonel
(and Iran-Contra conspirator) Oliver North and muckraker Geraldo Rivera
being granted plumb assignments in the run into Baghdad. Concerned about
being at a competitive disadvantage vis a vis Fox and operating under the
same ‘celebrity reporter walking the walk’ model, other cable, network and
print news outlets agreed to the terms and conditions imposed on their cover-
age of the conict in exchange for embedded access as well. To date, more
than 750 journalists have been embedded with US military units in Iraq. That
in turn has led to the use of embedded reporters in Afghanistan (Cockburn,
2010), to the point that in some journalistic circles the country became known
as ‘Embedistan’ (Farrell, 2010). Not surprisingly, embedding-type practices

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were adopted by US military partners such as the UK and Australia (the term
‘embedding-type’ refers to short-term journalistic assignment into a specic
military unit in the eld rather than longer-term cohabitation arrangement.
It is also different from one-off spot visits or military briengs). In one form
or another, by the end of the rst decade of the millennium, embedded jour-
nalism has become a standard feature in the media approach to covering war.
Embedded reporting as Trojan Horse
There was bound to be unanticipated synthesis emerging from the
action-reaction, thesis and antithesis relationship between the military and
embedded journalists. The relationship evolved, but not in the controlled
fashion that the military would have hoped. Specically, as the media and
the military became more comfortable with the practice of embedding
journalists in military units, a curious role change occurred. Rather than an
instrument employed by the military to get its favoured message across,
embedded journalism became a potential ‘enemy’ within. This was the
result of changing attitudes on the part of the military and the press corps as
conicts continued and home audience preferences changed. The result has
been something other than the original intention of framing the narrative.
The success of the original embedding project during the 2003 Iraq
invasion and occupation encouraged the military to expand the reach of
facilitated news provision. Content analysis of embedded versus non-
embedded reporting conrmed that embedded journalists were more likely to
present favourable interpretations of military activities and the soldiers that
they served with (Robbe, 2010). Yet, by 2007 the American public had begun
to lose interest in war stories. This was in part due to impatience and frustra-
tion on the part of the US public as months turned to years of engagement
without clear victory in sight in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the myriad
distractions provided by American popular culture and the dislocating effects
of economic recession on public interest in military engagements abroad, by
2008 the US military sought to move beyond the now routine coverage of
infantry and armoured tactical patrols and human interest stories and into
command centres in which strategic decision-making occurred.
Such was the case with the US Afghanistan command, where General
Stanley McChrystal and General David Petraeus (who also permitted em-
bedded reporters in the Iraq military command) allowed facilitated news
gathers to report from inside their command headquarters. The idea behind the

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expansion ‘upwards’ of embedded news coverage from tactical operations to
theatre and strategic policy-making was to demonstrate to the American public
the complexity and extent of this new form of ‘asymmetric’ warfare in which
the enemy fought and hid amongst civilian populations who were not entirely
supportive of the international effort to free them from local despotism and in
which a multiplicity of other national and international actors were involved.
The logic of the US military decision to ‘upscale’ the embedding process
was simple: for an American public increasingly disinterested in the wars and
disillusioned about the lack of progress towards a concrete victory in them, em-
bedded reporting from the command headquarters involved in those conicts
would shed light on the intricacy of the situation as well as the need to continue
to be steadfast in pursuit of a favourable outcome. Thus the narrative shifted
from the ‘grunt’ level perspective of the soldier on patrol to the strategic logic
of the generals who understood that the US had to continue its war missions
for larger reasons beyond nding Osama bin Laden1 and killing terrorists—
issues that included matters of international reputation, alliance commitment,
deterrence, and other geopolitical and strategic concerns. With the facilitated
move upwards, embedded reporters are now privy to the bigger picture and
the broader contours of the multi-layered game that is international conict.
The trouble for the US military is that removing embedded reporters from
the battleeld where their personal security rests in the hands of the soldiers
with whom they travel and moving them to secure command headquarters
where both their creature comforts and security are assured by the more benign
kinetic environment and layers of security surrounding the command, serve
to loosen the physical dependence of embedded journalists on the military
units to which they are attached. Even while on front line duty many embed-
ded journalists began to interview troops from units to which they were not
attached simply in search of a fresh story line, in semi-independent fashion.
This situation was compounded by the fact that just as the American public and
the corporate media began to lose interest in tactical-level embedding other
media outlets requested embedded status, including some with alternative
perspectives on matters of government policy such as the Public Broadcasting
System, Pacica News Network and Rolling Stone Magazine.
With broader media access to the embedding process and with looser
physical security ties between soldiers and reporters at the command
level, and given the debates over foreign military policy dividing the US
political elite and public throughout the early 2000s, the stage was set for

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embedded journalism to become the Trojan Horse of US military campaigns.
That occurred in 2010, when Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings
published a story about General McChrystal and his command staff detailing
how they were deeply critical of, if not insubordinate to, President Obama,
Vice-President Biden and some of their closest advisers (Hastings, 2010). The
uproar that ensued was fatal to General McChrystal’s career and seriously
undermined the Obama administration’s attempts to convey a unied and
coherent approach to national security affairs.
Although General McChrystal resigned and General Petraeus accepted
a demotion in order to replace him as Commander-in-Chief of US forces in
Afghanistan, the damage was done at several levels. The Rolling Stone story
detailed deep policy divisions and personal disrespect between members of the
military hierarchy and civilian command authority as well as basic uncertainty
among all of them about the progress of the war effort in Afghanistan. These
revelations were in turn noted by US allies in the UN-mandated and N ATO-
led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) ghting in Afghanistan,
with the resultant loss of support undermining allied commitment to continu-
ing their engagement with the US-led ISAF coalition. To that was added the
oft-times unattering commentary of troops in the eld to other embedded
reporters regarding the local population and the Afghan national leadership.
Eager to press the news cycle envelope in the quest for ratings and wishing to
capitalise on the deep political divisions extant at home for partisan purposes,
even ‘loyal’ American reporters began to deviate from the military’s preferred
narrative. This posed a serious dilemma for the US military, as it had come to
depend on embedded journalism as an antidote and counter-weight to critical
reporting of US military activities from independent and mostly foreign jour-
nalists and media organisations, including the Russia Today (RT) network, the
BBC, an assortment of European media sources, Al Jazeera and the WikiLeaks
organisation (which has its own version of embedded reporters in the form of
disgruntled US military personnel leaking classied information to it).
Beyond arguments about whether the quoted conversations were on
or off the record, the important thing to note about the McChrystal/Rolling
Stone story is that Hastings did not violate the guidelines and policies for
embedded journalists issued by the Central Command and Department of
Defense in 2003. To the contrary, he reported on issues that had nothing to
do with combat per se and all to do with the relationships and dispositions
of those in ag-level eld billets and their superiors in Washington DC.

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The conventions and protocols established in 2003 for the embedding of
journalists did not cover such reporting options because it presumed that
acceptance of the embedding conditions operative at the tactical level translated
into journalistic ‘loyalty’ to the military units involved even if the focus of
coverage moved to the command level. In the current media climate, that was
a stretch too far. Not surprisingly, in August 2010 Hastings had his ‘embed’
credentials revoked by the US Department of Defense (Greenwald, 2010).
The US military now sits on the horns of a dilemma: it needs embedded
journalists to convey its preferred message, but it can no longer rely on them
to faithfully do so. Moreover, other militaries have used journalists to convey
their own messages, not all of which accord with that of the US (for example,
the NZDF prefers to use journalists to emphasise the humanitarian aspects
of their involvement in ISAF rather than the fact that some of the NZDF
assets deployed in Afghanistan—the SAS in particular—are there to kill and
deter Taliban and al-Qaeda militants. This detracts from the US message that
the main ISAF objective is not nation-building and the promotion of human
rights but to defeat the Taliban and prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe
haven for al-Qaeda). To that can be added the return of independent journalists
(again, mostly non-US citizens) to difcult-to-control battle spaces such as
in Afghanistan, which unlike Iraq cannot be easily ring-fenced or cordoned
off using land and air power given the nature of the terrain. This means that
the US military is more or less back to square one when it comes to control-
ling the message about the conicts in which it is engaged (this is less so for
special operations missions in places like Yemen or Pakistan, which are highly
secret and conducted in conditions of extreme danger, thereby diminishing
the likelihood of any real time press coverage).
Where corporate media and military interests overlap and diverge
In the early days of embedded journalism corporate media and military in-
terests overlapped. Corporate media saw a protable return on its investment
in embedded journalism and the US military saw a positive spin given to its
combat operations. But as time drew on and audience preferences gravitated
to the likes of The Amazing Race and Jersey Shore, the quest for ratings-
driven prot, counterpoised against the need to maintain public support for
US military operations abroad, forced a divergence in perspectives between
the US military and the corporate media. Sympathetic war reporting was
increasingly seen by the US public as boring if not mere propaganda. It was

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no longer ‘fresh’. In a US political climate of deep partisan division, corpo-
rate media managers increasingly turned to ‘edgy’ stories that had a critical
perspective on war and its consequences so as to maintain falling reader and
viewership ratings. Some of it is quite partisan and anti-US—witness RT
coverage of any US military operations, al-Jazeera coverage of US policy
in the Muslim world, including its military engagement with it, and the
thrust of WikiLeaks document ‘dumps’—but much critical reporting on US
military operations is done by US and allied media agencies and citizens
with no particular ideological or nationalistic axe to grind.
As a result, the US military has learned the hard way what others already
knew: that money is made by ratings, and ratings are made by providing news
that is ‘fresh’. So long as military and media interests overlapped—that is,
the media made money providing sympathetic coverage of military opera-
tions—then all was well. But as soon as audiences tired of the sympathetic,
narrow tactical-level view of war and ratings for such news began to drop,
then the interests of the military and media began to diverge. The US military
thought best to go strategic with embedded reporting in order to sell the public
on the stakes and complexities involved in conict zones like Afghanistan. For
the corporate media, the answer to audience disinterest was not just to accept
the move into command-level embedding (which it was happy to do). It was
also to resume critical reporting in order to regain the ‘edgy’ perspective that
drove ratings and readership under the banner of press freedom. Under such
conditions having embedded journalists ‘go strategic’ made the problem of
uncontrolled reporting worse, not better.
Conclusion
As a type of news-gathering exercise, embedded journalism appears to be
here to stay. Originally facilitated with the purpose of framing the narra-
tive emerging from battle zones in light of the negative impact independent
journalism had on US public support for war, over the last decade it has
taken on a life of its own driven by prot-oriented corporate media logics
and a general tendency by news-gathering entities to no longer submit to
being manipulated in overt ways. Even if not universally accepted, editorial
independence within the embedded context is being asserted in a measure
that the US military did not foresee when it enunciated its formal guidelines
and policies for embedding in 2003. Efforts to expand the embedding practice
to the command level backred with revelations of command-level discord

116 PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 17 (1) 2011
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even while US public attention continues to drift away from war coverage
in general (one of the remarkable aspects of the November 2010 US
midterm elections was that debate over US military operations in
Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere were virtually non-existent, having been
eclipsed by arguments about taxation, federal decit spending, illegal
immigration and changing cultural mores). In sum, embedded journalism
evolved from an instrument of military control to a double-edged sword once
ratings-driven media logics argued in favour of a move away from sympathetic
and narrow tactical coverage. Moving the focus of embedded scrutiny up the
chain of command only worsened the conundrum.
It is difcult to predict how the practice of embedded journalism will
evolve. It may be discontinued and replaced with the usual PR junkets
into military zones and a return to more ‘old school’ non-embedded war
correspondence. But it more likely will survive as a journalistic practice,
in more than one guise. One potential scenario is that it will bifurcate
into two streams: one an instrumental PR/propaganda stream in which
militaries use sycophantic reporters or celebrities—comedians are very good
for this purpose, as Bob Hope’s Vietnam ASO tours proved even if the war
was ultimately lost—as tools in order to transmit a controlled and contrived
message about their operations within a specic news cycle. There could also
be a second critical stream in which, with a mind towards the historical record,
military commanders permit journalists to report freely (within the limits of
operational security) from within designated units over extended periods of
time. This stream will be truthful but perhaps time-delayed so as to protect
both the guilty and the innocent.
Both streams will depend on government approval, and that in turn hinges
on government agreement in principle with the notions of a free press acting
as a critic and conscience of society. Since many nations continue to be ruled
by authoritarians of various stripes and many democracies, new and old, are
suffering from various forms of institutional sclerosis, ethical decay, lack of
accountability, corruption, apathy, commodity fetishism and other maladies,
it will not be surprising if the rst stream dominates the latter, or that a return
to the practice of denying facilitated press access to the battleeld is seen by
States as the preferred method for dealing with news-gathering in a combat
environment. The answer ultimately lies in public demand for journalistic
objectivity and an honest media focus on government accountability in war
as well as peace.

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Note
1. From 2001 to 2011, Osama bin Laden was the major target of the so-called War on
Terror. On 2 May 2011, he was shot dead inside a walled compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, by US Navy Seals on a secret mission.
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Paul G. Buchanan is the principal of Buchanan Stategic Adivors Ltd., a New
Zealand-based political risk, market intelligence and strategic assessment
consultancy. The author of three books and more than 50 scholarly articles,
chapters, monographs and reviews, he has worked and consulted for several
US security agencies, and has held several academic appointments, including
at the University of Arizona, University of Auckland, University of Chile and
the National University of Singapore.
paulgbuchanan@gmail.com
BRUCE JESSON FOUNDATION
The Bruce Jesson Foundation presents two awards annually for critical,
informed, analytical and creative journalism or writing which will contribute
to public debate in New Zealand on an important issue or issues:
Bruce Jesson Journalist Award: $4000
This award is paid in advance to fund the time and costs required for an
investigative project. Criteria for the award are non-political and non-
sectarian.
Emerging Journalist Award: $1000
This award is paid for already-published work by a print journalism student
nominated by the country’s journalism programme leaders.
Full criteria details and application forms are at: www.brucejesson.com
Deadline: 31 August 2011