Military, media meet off battlefield to debate war coverage

[never cry wolf]

From today's Chicago Tribune Tempo Section (comics, x-word, leisure, etc.) Why it was in this section i'll never know.

snip-------------
By John Cook
Tribune staff reporter
Published August 18, 2003

Journalists who covered the war in Iraq and the generals who prosecuted it met in suburban Chicago last week in an unusual, informal gathering to debate the successes and failures of the media's reporting on the conflict and how the war changed the relationship between reporters and the military.

snip-------------

"The embedded process proved to be more beneficial to the government than to the media," said George Wilson, defense correspondent for the National Journal and longtime military reporter for The Washington Post, who traveled with an artillery unit in Iraq. "The rah-rah coverage of the units we were embedded with eclipsed a lot of larger questions."

snip----------------

Others faulted the program because it succeeded in keeping journalists "on the dogsled," as one participant put it, and away from places the Pentagon didn't want them to be.

" gave me the flexibility to do my job, a flexibility the embedded reporters didn't have," said Jonathan Landay, national security correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the American people that what happened in northern Iraq after the war was a little `untidiness.' What I saw, and what I reported, was a tsunami of murder, looting, arson and ethnic cleansing."

more........

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0308180200aug18,1,7930948.story?coll=chi-leisuretempo-hed

[finecraft]

1. What...the media was manipulated? I'm shocked!!!

(sarcasm off) What a bunch of idiots! They are just now figuring out that they were used??? I love the part about them praising Al-Jazeera and the rest of the international media. Losers, Losers one and all. Maybe the "war correspondents" can light a fire under the White House Press Corp to let them know just how stupid they look! Sheesh.....

[never cry wolf]

2. do you think that

maybe they sheepishly buried this article in the entertainment section of the paper, cuz they were embarassed?

[finecraft]

3. Something else the "news media" doesn't want you to know...

The Pentagon (oops! I mean us taxpayers) PAID for these idiot reporters to be in the "embedded media"! There was a story in the Milwaukee Journal a few months ago that it cost us taxpayers somewhere around $30,000 per "journalist" (read Pentagon mouthpiece) to get the "outsdanding" news coverage we did. The Pentagon paid for the jerks training, airfare over there on military transports, food and water while they were there, their "war clothing" including WMD suits and masks, and of course provided them with their transportation while embedded. This whole thing just makes me sick!

[never cry wolf]

4. well maybe

they (the media) are wising up a little. at least from the article it appears some of them are and they did do an article on it in a mainstream paper publishing that they were manipulated.

[DoYouEverWonder]

5. Why don't they just put them on the government payroll

and quit calling them journalists. The embeds are more like spokespeople, who deliver the military's message everyday. Shouldn't they be treated as such?

Embeds are not journalists and the two should no longer be considered the same thing. Not that we shouldn't coninue to have embeds but it shouldn't be to the exclusion of having real journalists, who are willing to risk their lives to get the 'real' story.

What happened in Iraq is that the media allowed the government to control access to information by only allowing embeds in to cover the war. From now on we need both.

And we need to straigten out whose payroll these folks are on. It is not possible to report objectively when you get your paycheck directly from the people you are covering.