Embedistan

BAGHDAD — Even before a magazine journalist brought down Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the institutionalized practice of journalists moving and living with military units was one of the most controversial legacies of America’s 21st-century wars.

“The Runaway General”, Rolling Stone’s profile of the former American commander in Afghanistan, is an example of the insight that reporters can bring to bear upon a military campaign and its leaders if they are granted access. And, crucially, if they are prepared to forgo hagiography and deliver instead a warts-and-everything portrait.

“Embedding” is one of the words that emerged from the jargon of soldiers, diplomats, politicians and spin doctors involved with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and entered the public discourse alongside “shock and awe,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “insurgent,” “hajji,” “Green Zone,” “blast wall,” “tipping point,” “contractor,” “Blackwater,” “death blossom,” “Abu Ghraib,” “I.E.D.,” “M.R.A.P.,” “Awakening” and “surge.”

It was not in fact a term born in Iraq — the practice of chroniclers traveling with soldiers is as old as war, and even the word “embedding” itself was in use in the 1990s. But Iraq was certainly where it crossed over into the wider lexicon. Within the military there may now be some debate about whether embedding survives in its current form, after a journalist granted close access helped bring about the downfall of a four-star general within the very military system which spawned it.

Over the coming weeks At War will present in the series Embedistan different perspectives on the theory and practice of embedding from correspondents, photographers, Iraqi journalists — some who were working for The New York Times and some who were not — as well as soldiers and Iraqis. We welcome your comments, and invite you to share your own thoughts and experiences, especially if you have reported from either Iraq or Afghanistan, or have served there in the military and have first-hand experience of embedded or unembedded journalism.

Objectivity

Embedding has its proponents, and its detractors.

The notion of journalists being able to travel with soldiers, live alongside them, depend upon them for food, safety and then to produce objective dispatches provokes extreme suspicion among some readers, viewers and commentators.

They argue that it is a tool of the military, allowing them to manipulate inexperienced or impressionable journalists into being useful fools, or what my colleague Rod Nordland describes in a forthcoming post as “scribbling victims of Stockholm Syndrome.”

However, proponents of embedding argue that in asymmetric conflicts — especially those in countries with a high risk of kidnapping and murder — embedding allows reporters, photographers and cameramen to go to areas that they could not do otherwise.

Rich Oppel, a Times correspondent with lengthy service in Iraq and Afghanistan, notes in another forthcoming post that by worrying about the risk that some senior commanders are skilled enough at the media management aspect of the modern commander’s job to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, critics dwell too much upon the practice of embedding with generals and colonels. He argues that there are genuine benefits to journalists embedding to glean the perspective of ordinary soldiers and Marines who go far outside the wire, and sometimes far off-message.

“These very legitimate qualms and criticisms also ignore the highest utility of embeds: Reporting the perspectives and emotions of the troops on the ground, who, despite risk to their careers, go well out of their way to bluntly describe the failings and mistakes that have so often plagued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their comments often impeach the official line from Washington, serving as an important check on the influential opinions of others – including politicians and politically-appointed officials, and many commentators – who, taken as a group, have tended to be more optimistic, and incorrectly so, than troops doing the actual fighting,” he writes.

Certainly, in recent months C.J. Chivers, a Times correspondent and former Marine, has shown in his extensive reports from Afghanistan’s Helmand Province the value of having a writer who is able to graft front-line military experience and insights to forensic on-the-ground reporting.

Some writers make careers and reputations out of embedding, perhaps the most recent being the prolific Michael Yon, a former Green Beret who has blogged from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Others make careers and reputations out of refusing to embed.

What such skeptics fear is that reporters come to identify with the military to such an extend that they no longer have the will, even if they have the means, to report bad news. Whether conscious of it or not, they self-censor.

Certainly anyone who has embedded for any length of time is familiar with remarks such as: “You didn’t hear that/You didn’t see that…”, “Do you have to use that…?”, “That’s not what he meant to say…”, “That was off the record…”, “Can you leave that out…?”.

Seymour Hersh

In April, Seymour Hersh, perhaps the most distinguished investigative journalist of the Vietnam and Iraq wars with his exposes on the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib torture scandal, came out decisively against embedding.

Speaking at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva,  Mr. Hersh was forthright about the entire concept, pronouncing: “Embedding is the worst single thing that has happened to journalism in the last decade and a half, and it began with the First Gulf War. It is a brilliant strategy. And it has really curbed, and hurt journalism.”

In his keynote speech he elaborated:

Ultimately, we are not partners of the government. And this is what happened too much after 9/11. Too many of the American reporters became jingoistic, they joined the team.

We were embedded. We were embedded with military units. I’m very much against embedding, because that’s not our job — to be embedded. Our job is to report on them with no obligations, none whatsoever.

And I know that puts me in a minority with a lot of people, but when you are embedded with a military unit, the inevitable instinct is to not report everything you see, because you get to know them, they are protecting you, etc.

So I am really a hardliner on this.

As we move this summer toward a marked diminution, if not the end, of American combat presence in Iraq, there will be fewer and fewer such embeds in Iraq. Indeed, there will be less and less journalism of any kind, as many television and other media organizations have significantly cut back on their Baghdad operations because of cost, the protracted nature of the conflict and a shift in emphasis to Afghanistan.

This occasional series, Embedistan, will look at aspects of the coverage of the conflicts in both countries from those who have worked there embedded, unembedded, and a mixture of both.