Embedded reporters make for good journalism

I’m thoroughly baffled by my journalistic colleagues who complain about embedding reporters with U.S. combat units in Iraq.

I’ve heard essentially two criticisms of embedding. One is that the more than 500 reporters hunkered down with soldiers will inevitably focus on the small picture, rather than the big picture; they’ll cover the individual battles their units engage in and the human-interest stories of individual soldiers, instead of giving their readers and viewers an overall account of the war.

The other complaint is that embedded reporters are not just embedded but -- inevitably -- in bed with the military, providing coverage that “translates into victories for the U.S. military in their concerted propaganda campaign against Iraq, its allies and its sympathizers,” as Jack Shafer wrote recently on Slate.com.

Embedded journalists, according to this argument, become so dependent on their military partners for their stories and their safety that they come to identify with the soldiers, thus abandoning their professional detachment and allowing themselves to be co-opted into reporting more favorably -- and less skeptically -- than the facts may warrant.

All this may well be true. And there’s no question that the confluence of modern technology and a radical change in the Pentagon’s approach to combat access has given embedded journalists an unprecedented opportunity for which they’re deeply grateful.

“What you’re seeing is truly historic television and journalism,” Walter Rodgers of CNN said, with more than a hint of pride, one day recently as a tank from “his” unit went rumbling across both the Iraqi landscape and millions of TV screens.

But how can reporters -- any reporters, anywhere -- complain about too much access? Access and information are our life’s blood. In Iraq, embedding with front-line units is “a reporter’s dream,” as ABC’s Ted Koppel puts it. Reporters -- and their editors -- just have to decide how best to turn that dream-come-true into useful coverage.

I see nothing wrong -- and a great deal right -- with real-time television stories and pictures and next-day newspaper accounts of individual battles and the triumphs, tragedies and daily routine of individual soldiers. Nor am I terribly concerned with reporters falling prey to some more or less beneficent version of the Stockholm syndrome and identifying with the soldiers they’re accompanying.

Much as I hate to agree with Donald Rumsfeld, I think the secretary of Defense is absolutely right when he said during a recent Pentagon briefing, “What we’re seeing [on television] is not the war in Iraq. What we’re seeing are slices of the war in Iraq.”

A slice is all that reporters -- no matter how good -- can give viewers (or readers) if they’re covering a war, or any big, ongoing story, on a daily basis. What reporters try to do is make that slice as accurate and fair and responsible as they can. What better way to do that in a war than by traveling with the troops waging the war? And what better way to tell their fellow Americans what the war is like for individual soldiers -- who, after all, have the most to risk (their lives) -- than by providing some details on their routine, their thoughts, their hopes and their fears?

Again, it’s then up to the editors and news directors back home to put all that in context, to provide the necessary balance and big-picture perspective.

I’ve heard the complaints that the reportage of embedded journalists is so immediate, so dramatic, so unprecedented that it shoves big-picture journalism out of the picture.

Baloney.

The all-news networks waste hours every day broadcasting speculation and journalistic food fights, repeating each development ad nauseam and interviewing former generals whose analyses and second-guessing are often as laughably misinformed as those armchair experts who are now predicting the Dodgers will win the World Series.

There would be plenty of time for the big picture were not TV so enamored of the big mouth.

Meanwhile, the better newspapers are also devoting huge resources to the war -- and they do provide the big picture, every day.

As for the alleged loss of independence and objectivity of the embedded reporter, well, sure, any reporter who spends a lot of time in close proximity to sources and subjects has to guard against the tendency to identify with them, to feel competing and conflicting loyalties. It’s tempting to overstate their accomplishments and overlook their shortcomings, either unwittingly or in a conscious desire to curry favor and ensure future access.

Reporters who cover the White House, the police beat, the Lakers, the movie studios or any other beat have to deal with this problem daily. Of course, it’s more difficult in a combat situation. Much more difficult.

Wanting to stay in the good graces of sources so they’ll return your phone call or let you in the locker room is not remotely as compelling as wanting to stay in the good graces of sources who could save your life. But the principle is the same. Editors and news directors thousands of miles from Iraq, who don’t have that same sense of dependency, have a professional obligation to evaluate and decide when, how and whether to use the stories and pictures their embedded reporters and photographers send them.

Moreover, given the traditional skepticism of journalists here and the multiplicity of their outlets, the burgeoning number of antiwar activists, the ubiquity of the Internet and the presence of many reporters in Iraq who are not embedded -- “unilaterals,” in the argot of this war -- I can’t imagine any news outlet except Fox getting away with gung-ho coverage for very long.

Some second thoughts?

In fact, we’ve already seen so much questioning, critical coverage of the war -- Did the U.S. military underestimate the Iraqis? Did the invasion start too soon, with too few troops? Was the initial strategy misguided? -- that the administration has dispatched all of its top policy makers and talking heads to make the rounds of the weekend TV shows to defend their war plans and praise the progress of the war effort.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pentagon comes to regret having agreed to the embedding process.

It embedded reporters because it realized, as ABC’s John McWethy told me, that “a huge part of winning any war has to do with the world’s perception of how that war is being fought.”

The White House was so confident that its mission was just and its victory assured that it wanted independent witnesses on hand to show the world its righteous triumph -- and the heinous acts it was sure the enemy would commit.

Those heinous acts have already begun. But victory hasn’t come as quickly or as easily as the White House expected, and I’d be willing to bet that if U.S. casualties mount, if the war drags on for months, instead of weeks, and if embedded journalists start providing daily accounts, in living color, of failed missions, civilian casualties and combat atrocities, they may find themselves un-embedded faster than you can say John Wayne.

Just look at the story William Branigin of the Washington Post filed last week while being embedded with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. Soldiers in that division killed seven women and children in a car the troops said failed to stop, despite commands and warning shots.

Branigin’s story quoted Capt. Ronny Johnson, who ordered the warning shots, as subsequently telling his platoon leader, “You just

The Pentagon has ordered an investigation, but I suspect that military brass wasn’t happy with Branigin’s account -- and we should be grateful for it, an account we would not have had if he had not been embedded.

For now, embedding is giving us a rare window on war. The critics should stop carping.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.