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EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
Also pleased were some media analysts and
military leaders. Rem Rieder, the editor the
American Journalism Review (AJR), gushed, “It
is clear that the great embedding experiment
was a home run as far as the news media and the
American people are concerned.” The disgraced
former National Security Advisor and Fox News
embed in Iraq, Oliver North, was beside himself
with praise for the access it gave him. U.S. Military
Commander Gen. Tommy Franks agreed
and pledged that embedding would be used in
future military operations.
Now that the war is over, some of the “embeds”
are more candid about their experiences than
they were when they were on the battlefield.
Talk Radio News reporter Gareth Schweitzer,
who was with the 3rd Infantry, told Mother Jones
that he valued his experience but had misgivings.
He told Michelle Chihara: “Physically, there
was a lot of stuff they simply couldn’t not show
you. You were riding with them. It was there.
There was no way to anesthetize the process. At
the same time, on a couple of occasions when I
was taken by a colonel to a site he wanted to
show me, it was just a PR rap. The army definitely
had a message they wanted to get out. At
one point, a colonel came back to the unit just to
take me and another journalist on a guided tour.
He wanted to show us places where Iraqis had
been fighting and where they had been sleeping,
– a weapons dump. I wanted a chance to look at
the stuff myself, without the guided tour. But it
just wasn’t always possible.
Mother Jones: But how hard was it to be objective
about the decisions being made by the
troops who were protecting you, possibly saving
your life?
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Schweitzer: “You know, anybody who tried to
claim that their reporting, as an embed, was
unbiased was not telling the truth. Then you’re
looking for the wrong thing from the process. At
least for myself, I was not trying to be embedded
for mere facts. We were getting our information
from our own eyes, and from American battle
commanders.”
The perceptions fueled by this type of reporting
had political consequences, he said.
“What’s struck me is that for a lot of the conservatives
who supported this war, validation
seems to be in the victory. We prosecute it successfully,
we win and the fact that we win validates
us being there in the first place. That
makes no rational sense at all. The purpose of
our entrance was not to defeat another army but
to accomplish a lot of more difficult tasks, none
of which have been accomplished, save getting
rid of some of the Ba’ath Party of Saddam Hussein.”
Schweitzer also noted that there had been
many mistakes, including information fed to
reporters that in the hot house of live television
was relayed to the public without verification.
Like what?
Schweitzer: “On a variety of occasions,
reporters said that they had stumbled across
chemical weapons sites, and it was displayed
prominently on TV, on some of the news channels,
and it was also broadcast by a number of
people. And on each and every occasion it
turned out not to be true. There were also
reports of ‘heavy fighting’ up north by the town
of Karbala. There was almost no fighting there.”
The Project on Excellence in Journalism found
that half the stories from embedded journalists
showed combat action but not a single story