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cell door was closed and the click of its padlock
confirmed that he would not be leaving his 6- by
10-foot room that night. With each breath he made
a sort of crying sound. Sometimes he broke that
rhythm to exhale his pain with more force, and
the otherwise silent block filled up with what I
wondered might be the man’s last gasp.”
U.S. mistreats reporters
THIS tearful and horrific account was given lots
of airtime on all the channels, as it should. An
interview with non-embedded foreign journalists
detained by U.S. military forces was aired on
Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now yesterday, but
not, as far as I know, picked up by any of the
majors. It involved the experience of four socalled
unilaterals. I reported on this last week.
One of them was Dan Semama who describes
meeting some U.S. soldiers who suspected they
were spies. “They took away our cameras. They
took away our ID cards. They took away our
money. They took our phones. They put their
guns towards us. They forced us to lie down on
the floor. To take our shirts up to make sure we
didn’t have any explosives on our bodies and
were arrested.”
At that point a Portuguese reporter asked the
soldiers to phone home and tell his wife he was
ok. Semama continues, “Five soldiers went out
of the camp, jumped on him and started to beat
him and to kick him. We ran to his direction.
They all put bullets inside the cannons of their
guns, and they said if we move forward they
shoot at us. We were standing like stupid guys.
We saw our friend lying on the ground crying,
hurting. They tied his hand behind his back.
They took him into the camp. And after half-an-
SURROUNDING BAGHDAD
159
hour, they let him go, and came back to us all
crying. And then came this Lieutenant Scholl.
And he told us, ‘Don’t mess with my soldiers.
Don’t mess with them because they are trained
like dogs to kill. And they will kill you if you try
again.” They were held for 36 hours.
Reporting on the content
of the coverage
THE Project On Excellence in Journalism has
issued a report on the embedded journalists.
Here’s what they report: “The embedded coverage,
the research found, is largely anecdotal. It’s
both exciting and dull, combat focused, and
mostly live and unedited. Much of it lacks context
but it is usually rich in detail. It has all the
virtues and vices of reporting only what you can
see.”
In an age when the press is often criticized for
being too interpretive, the overwhelming majority
of the embedded stories studied, 94 percent,
were primarily factual in nature. Most of the
embedded reports studied were live and
unedited accounts. Viewers were hearing mostly
from reporters, not directly from soldiers or
other sources. In eight out of ten stories we
heard from reporters only.
This is battle coverage. Nearly half of the
embedded reports (47 percent) described military
action or the results. “While dramatic, the
coverage is not graphic. Not a single story examined
showed pictures of people being hit by fired
weapons.
“Over the course of reviewing the coverage,
project analysts also developed a series of more
subjective impressions of embedding. Often the
best reports were those that were carefully writ-