Embedded Journalism Research Paper

“Words of Fire,” by Anthony Collings, details the lives of different journalists in regards to free press and covering potentially dangerous stories. Anthony Collings is a former CNN reporter who shifted his focus from reporting to telling the story of journalists who have come under fire in a power struggle between government and free press. Collings puts free press into a spectrum, on one side there is the United States, where the press is largely free, and on the other side there are places like North Korea or China where press is largely restricted by the government. Collings does not focus on these extremes, but rather the places in the middle where there is an ongoing struggle between state power.

The military and U.S. government have the ultimate say in what is broadcasted. For Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military came up with new press rules that addressed previous criticisms that it did not allow journalists contact with fighting troops in combat situations. The Pentagon now allowed reporters to travel with U.S. military units as long as they followed a strict set of rules. These rules basically meant that the military could censor and monitor all outgoing broadcasts and reports from the war. If any of the rules were broken, the reporter would be immediately sent out of contact with the military. This makes it very hard to believe the broadcasts coming from the conflict, yet the American public accepted them as the truth which is exactly how the government had designed.

Unfortunately, the entirety of America faced such a reality during the Vietnam War. According to Spector, a large number of journalists found themselves

Two narratives that Waisanen portrays within his article are two video clips from Onion News Network in which he uses to elaborate and discuss further his main idea. The first narrative that Waisanen portrays is about “… the presidential race heats up, a new survey finds that again, this year, the number one issue among voters, bullshit” (512). He further describes how the news is being illustrated with a news anchor that speaks in a schematized tone similar to the news anchor on public news that is usually broadcasted. The reason why Waisanen uses this narrative is to support his point of the Onion News Network who mocks and deprives the practices of what the “real” news normally portrays and broadcasts. Moreover, another narrative that Waisanen portrays is another video clip from Onion News Network about a morning show similar to Good Morning America where two news anchors discuss about a dog mascot known as “Liberty” who is on a mission to “ …psyched up troops suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” (513). Primarily the news is to “lament the death of the American army mascot” (513). However, Waisanen uses this video clip as an example to show how the Onion News Network videos illustrate and broadcast videos to viewers that may somewhat have some truth; for instance, the unfortunate battle that soldiers go through with PTSD, but at the same time they never portray or say the real or “whole picture” (523) of what is being broadcasted. In addition, Waisanen

He believes that the capitalist colonization of the digital world has led to this collapse of professional-quality journalism as a result of the further commercialization of journalism. In recent years, investigative journalism has been declining and media companies have shifted away from it and settled for repeating prepackaged messages. It is difficult for real journalism to exist when its revenue is based on advertisement. McChesney argues that journalism should be considers as public goods and that we should create non-commercial forms of journalism and non-profit media. One of the “darkest episodes of American journalism history” was the invasion of Iraq based on the U.S. administration’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. These claims went unchallenged by the media because of the lack of investigative journalism, McChesney believes. Furthermore, he ends with bold proposals to reform journalism and the entire media. He proposes a strict regulation of advertising and limitations on ownership of broadcast media and expansion of nonprofit and publicly supported journalism. I agree with McChesney about the decline of quality journalism and I believe reforms to media must happen. However, I am uncertain how this would be possible with all the control these wealthy corporations, and their partners, have over the media. It will need a huge

Carlson, Timothy and Katovsky, Bill, _Embedded: The media at war in Iraq_, The Lyons Press, Guilford, 2003.

War reporting crashed into Megan Stack’s life almost like the war on terror crashed into America. She was vacationing in Paris on September 11, 2001. Within days, she received the call and was rushed onto an aircraft carrier to travel to Afghanistan to report about the war. “I wound up there by accident, rushed into foreign reporting by coincidence…” Stack wrote in Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War, a personal memoir of her reporting through the Middle East (2). She documents her experiences of the American-led invasion of Iraq & Afghanistan, while exploring conflicts in Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Libya. She works her way through strings of violence and terror that have tangled with US foreign policy.

Operation Iraqi Freedom saw a new rise in media censorship for embedded journalists, before departing their country of origin and being embedded with a military unit journalists were required to undergo joint training and sign contracts vowing not to report information that could compromise unit position, future missions, classified weapons, and information they might find during their time in the field. When asked about the purpose of the embedded journalists and these new restrictions Lt. Col. Rick Long of the U.S. Marine Corps replied "Our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment.” Journalism from the front was no longer being used as a method of information broadcasting for concerned families and civilians at home, but to ensure proper reception of the war and shape public opinion not only in the United States, but the world as a whole.

War is truly a horrific event that unfortunately occurs in our world frequently. There are a variety of ethical questions surrounding war, such as how much should citizens know about the fighting? When it comes to reporting the news, it is the goal of the network to report the news first. The benefit to this is people will turn to them first when it comes to breaking stories. However if the news is delivered based on speed and not accuracy this can be harmful to society. War is a very serious event and should not be taken lightly. Therefore, reporters must make sure facts are correct and unbiased. In both the Vietnam War and our current war we see reporters going to extreme measures to be the first

The news coverage of war has been of particular relevance to media and communication researchers.This interest is due to the violence in wars, its importance to the people, the vast amount of finance, men and equipment poured into it. The study of media and war has spurred a contention on the role of the objectivity during a conflict. For a journalist covering a war, the ideal should be, according to Howard Tumber in Handbook of Journalism states that ‘The accepted norm for individual reporters, based on their professional values is that they should adopt a neutral role in reporting conflict, avoiding bias and striving

2. The main points of the article are focused around the way in which news is presented to the public. Through identifying multiple sources of news information, such as the New York Times, Fox News, and an English website, AlJazeera.net, to name a few, the article points out the varying differences and biases generated based upon the omission of certain factual information, the choice of words, and the credibility of the sources. Despite journals being presented with the same underlying information, the information that is presented to the public varies greatly in both the tone and mission from news article to news article. This is further elaborated as a way for the news media to appeal to certain types of demographics. For example, through wording an article in such a way that presents a military action conducted by the U.S. military as a ruthless act of

The established freedom within this uncensored war, unleashed an unprecedented amount of evidence, thus allowing the media to become a tool for oral and visual communication for the masses, ultimately changing the method of historical approach. The ‘nature of evidence’ significantly changed during the television age as the intensity of war coverage changed. Professor Phillip M. Taylor ascertains that the role of the media enabled the general public to be "take a front seat at the making of history on the shirt-tails of journalism”. Therefore, the public became histories witnesses - albeit indirect participants - through the media. Many theorists argue that the media did not create or script any events that played out in the war, rather the

Americans reported that the primary source for gaining news was the television. In addition to the digital advancements in media, reporters could now travel to the place of battle and take clearer photographs of soldiers on the field. However, with such advancements in the media and easy access, this caused a major issue for the government. With a lack of proper censorship on such graphic topics, the media swayed the opinion of thousands across the United States. The media’s presence in the war grew rapidly throughout the years, hoping for juicy topics that would evoke an emotion from the American people.

Due to the widespread availability and popularity, the internet had an immense impact upon the Iraq war (Raine, Fox and Fallows, 2015). It provided a platform for anti-war activism and it aided in the coverage of the conflict, not only by helping journalists connect outside the war zone but it also gave a platform for ordinary people to give their opinions and take on the war. Due to this impact the Iraq war and was quickly referred to as the first internet war, making the internet to Iraq war what television was to Vietnam.

Thousands of our nation's men and women were fighting for their country, yet the media limited the amount of information that they chose to pass on to the public. Each day the media is faced with the choice of making decisions of what news to pass on, when that news could make a significant difference in someone's life, or in the fate of our nation.