My post about the RAND study of embedded journalists drew an angry response from Carl Prine, author of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's report on the study. Prine is angry because I tagged him for rearranging the RAND press release nearly word-for-word. Now, I welcome angry comments on my blog, especially when it's from journalists I've criticized. But his anger gets the better of him, and simple logic eludes his grasp. Here's Prine in his comment:
Considering I pre-read the very study, and was cited therein, it's a laugh to suggest I simply "re-arranged" the press release. I would suggest you actually read the work RAND did before you conclude something so ridiculous.
Now, I have not had time to read the study in full, although I plan to do so. My conclusion had nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the actual study (PDF here). My inference that Prine reworked the press release was drawn from simple comparison of the article to the press release.
Line-by-line fisking is unnecessary, because reading the two together proves the point just as elegantly. The structure of the two is essentially identical, the first two paragraphs are carbon copies, and the article uses extensive block quotes to make its points. Prine mentions the possibility that propagandistic necessity might be the driving force for embedding, but only in order to reject it out of hand:
Key fears of critics before the war that the press would be manipulated or heavily censored by the military -- or that the actions of reporters would lead to the deaths of servicemen -- didn't pan out, Paul said.
No evidence is adduced to support this quote, which comes from the chief author of the RAND study.
Prine mentions himself within the article as one of the embedded journalists under study. And the full study gives him a credit for "helpful reviews of this document during the quality assurance process". So a writer thoroughly emplaced within the propaganda system helps to review the study that justifies the propaganda system as "a major success for the military, the press and the American public". And when he's called on that, and the fact that he didn't bother to treat of any possible objections or criticisms, he responds with petulance.
This, my friends, is Your American Media.
This, my friends, is an unsophisticated look at a complicated subject by an uninformed blogger. Just read the study.
Posted by: Carl at December 13, 2004 03:51 PMCarl--
You seem doggedly determined to avoid the crux of my criticism. Regardless of what the RAND report actually said, side-by-side comparison of the press release to your article most definitely supports my claim that you rewrote the press release in near-identical terms, not bothering to add any critical framings, questions, or voices from an oppositional viewpoint, except when they were spoken by Christopher Paul himself.
Your history as a Marine is admirable, as is your reporting on security holes in US chemical plants. I laud you for that. But I think you are caught up in a sense that the media is on the battlefield to help the military fight the war, and are so occupied with that patriotic mission that you can't see how your journalism propagates distortions and half-truths.
Perhaps my summary of the embedding system as a propaganda tool is simplistic. Perhaps I am blinkered in a lefty worldview in which I can only see things from my perspective. All that aside, even a factually challenged liberal such as myself can read two pieces of text and see that one more or less exactly resembles the other.
And "unsophisticated look at a complicated subject" is just priceless. I think I shall make that my new blog tag.
Let's begin with a discussion about the realities of daily print journalism. I had eight inches of copy with which to work.
Because I wasn't even in DC, where the press conference on the report took place, I didn't get a release. In fact, your blog was the first chance for me to read it, so you can understand my discomfort at being said to have "lifted" anything from a press release I had not even read.
Again, I was in an unusual position because I had read other iterations of the report over a long period of time. What you see as bullets on a press release, I have as working points from the rough draft and summary sheets. That these very points made it into bullets on a press release isn't surprising. They're found in the report, too.
In fact, I note now that the press release actually added a couple of points I didn't have in other forms, so it was, in some ways, more complete than my brief in that regard.
The lede I wrote reflected the first words out of the author's mouth. It was a statement that is so terse, so devoid of fussiness, I don't apologize for using it. It appears in an introduction to the work, too.
The grafs that followed were not from the press release, but the study itself.
I see no mention in the release you link that shows pre-invasion fears about censorship; the role my newspaper played covering the war (readers should know that, including that the byline belonged to an embedded reporter); the unique perspective on operation security offered in the author's quotes; the larger question of why reporters didn't spill the beans on tactics (professionalism, etc.); the need for continuing dialogue between the Pentagon and the various media on the issues raised, etc.
I don't see any of that in the press release. It can only be found in the body of the study.
Don't get me wrong. I would have loved to have had the space and time to pound out a long discussion that included contrary points to the conclusions, etc., not to mention bringing up the issue of access in re Kevin Sites and his footage from Fallujah.
Until that day arrived, however, did you want me to simply pass on the study? Or give a half-inch quote to somebody who had not read it but disregarded the conclusions at face value? I fail to see how that would have served our readers.
I'm an experienced war correspondent. Do you think I haven't posited perhaps better ways to cover a war? Different strategies to employ when reporting on combat? But that's irrelevant to the Dec. 7 assignment, which was to explain what the authors believed, sans my own opinions.
You moreover seem to assume that I share all or most of the points of the study. You have no idea what my beliefs are about the embedding system because they don't show up in the study or the brief I wrote about it. That's why I'm a bit puzzled about the gratuitous quip that the Magic Eightball determined I'm somehow "occupied with that patriotic mission" rather than serving my readers.
How do you know that I'm not a fan of the IWW? How do you know I didn't oppose the war? Or favored it? What is my opinion on embedding vs. pool systems? How can you know what I was thinking when I read the report?
You can't. I read the study and its working notes before the report was launched. I was one of many embedded and unilateral reporters who shared perspectives on the current system and the policy implications for keeping it, reforming it or scrapping it. But I have no claim on the final product, and I make no published judgements about it because it's not my job to do so other than to say that, thus far, it's the best policy paper I've seen on the subject.
It seems lazy, however, to categorically disregard a lengthy report one has not read simply because of preconceived notions about the merits or failings of the embedding process.
Odder still to impute motives to a reporter you don't know. I'm not exactly a "press release" kind of guy, if you haven't noticed. Perhaps, just perhaps, I had a great deal of this, in very similar form, before the report came out?
At last, a constructive dialogue. Thank you for responding at such length. I understand the time pressures of journalism don't always allow you to work out all viewpoints thoroughly. I see this as a major flaw in the way journalism has become subservient to the corporate imperative: keep the bottom line tight, so there's no time to think, just crank out the copy.
You disclose in the article that the Tribune-Review had embedded reporters; that does add to the reader's understanding. But wouldn't it also be good to disclose that you helped vet the study before publication? That fact shows you have some kind of link with the study's authors. I can't speculate on the nature of that link, but it seems relevant to the coverage.
OK, so you didn't rewrite the press release. I still think the similarity is marked. That you independently came up with such similar copy suggests a similarity of outlook, if not a direct coordination of effort.
RAND is up to its eyeballs with interest in making the military look good; your paper, as a Scaife-owned outlet, is similarly compromised. Your article is a classic example of how "unbiased journalism" is a cloak for corporate/military agendas: the objective, fair report on an objective, scientific study, the purpose of which is to legitimate the latest innovations in control of the media.
Embedding is sheer propaganda genius: you don't actually have to censor anyone actively, and you don't have to manipulate them -- just put them in the foxhole, make sure they can only see certain things, and their limited perspective and dependence on the soldiers will do the rest. And if a Kevin Sites occasionally drops a disturbing story, that just provides additional legitimacy, since people can point at it and say that not all embeds produce stories favorable to the military.
Anyway, I look forward to reading the full study.
Actually, I did write in there about my own role in the study, and included a link so that readers could judge the study for themselves. That, unfortunately, was cut because of length.
It should be noted that not only did the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review have one embedded reporter in Iraq, but we also had a unilateral journalist who is fluent in Arabic accompanying the Kurds to Baghdad.
Again, as I have patiently sought to explain, the bullets for my story -- and the press release to some extent, I hazard -- came from working points from earlier versions of the study. Forgive me for cribbing an outline I reviewed months ago.
To completely deconstruct this notion about Mr. Scaife, I would propose three realities you might not have considered: (1) He takes no direct control over the editorial process and our front page functions much like the Wall Street Journal's, although we have a conservative/libertarian opinion page; (2) the opinion page, if you hadn't noticed, opposed the invasion of Iraq; (3) two of my stories last year were singled out for praise by that bastion of right-wing thought, The Nation, and I'm still employed.
Oh.
I won't attempt to argue with your points that reporters are captives of the military, or whatever, when they're embedded. To some extent, a combat correspondent is always embedded with someone for the simple fact that one must visit the various sides in a conflict separately.
This has been true whether I was in Iraq or Sudan or Sierra Leone or any other place.
The reality is that a reporter in any social event so vast as a war or a disaster or a pandemic or whatever, must rely on other voices to beef up his, or her, stories. That's the role of the editors, who pull in additional perspetives.
I like to think that our newspaper, which isn't particularly large compared to the national dailies, did a pretty good job balancing what I saw with our unilateral's perspective AND the work of others around the world.
The RAND study pointed out that this should be the role of news outlets and cautioned especially against relying solely on embedded reporters.
Posted by: Carl at December 14, 2004 03:19 PM
The fact that your disclaimer was cut says something to me. Why was that important piece of information cut, and not another sentence? Why leave in the reference to the paper's own embeds and cut the disclosure that you were involved in reviewing the study? One fact makes the paper look better, one fact makes it look worse. Corporate control is flexible enough to let certain things through, true (like your paper's editorial opposition to the Iraq war), but by and large everyone knows which side their bread is buttered on.
Your point that reporters are always captive to some source is definitely apposite. War by its nature hides the truth. Reporters may not be able to get around that basic fact. What I've read of the RAND study is quite explicit in setting out the goals of controlling what angle of truth gets exposed -- although it couches this in terms such as "information operations". For example (quoting the study pg xviii):
"The 'shock and awe' campaign at the beginning of the war made the press a willing participant in showing the advancing might of US armed forces."
The "shock and awe" would look very different as covered by, say, Al Jazeera. This passage in the study sets out the press as a division of the military. To me, that's blatant propaganda, and something we should all condemn.
Anyway, thank you for engaging me on this issue.
Sigh.
I don't know how much "corporate control" was exerted by a late night copy editor, trying to fit a story onto a lopsided page, clipping the final two lines of an already very short story. I have a feeling that her decision had far more to do with a need to get it all to fit on the page rather than the Invisible Hand of Capital guiding her palm on the mouse.
And, as a very experienced war correspondent with some ability to judge these sorts of things, I think it's fairly reasonable to conclude that anyone who watched the U.S. roll over one of the largest land armies in the world in three weeks would hazard the American military, indeed, was an "advancing might" of sheer violent power.
No need to coerce anyone about that salient fact. Since I happened to know several of the Al Jazeera reporters covering that very reality, I'm fairly certain after the capital fell they were convinced, too, despite earlier "analyses" that were far off the mark.
You might recall that Al J, and to a lesser extent the BBC, was broadcasting the notion that somehow the U.S. wasn't in Baghdad when they had an army brigade in the center of town and a division of Marines busting in door.
Reporters become very "willing" participants when what they see is true. Unless you saw a version of the invasion I missed, it seemed like the U.S. military was fairly unstoppable. Perhaps I should have speculated along the way that I wasn't seeing village after village fall in rapid succession, but rather a terrible defeat of U.S. forces.
Do you want an uninformed but tenured professor at a New England liberal arts college handicapping the war from the edge of his bowtie, or a cynical, experienced newsman who has been shot at around the world describing the scene? You pick.
I might be biased here, but I imagine most readers want the guy who has made a life's study of war, national security and foreign affairs. Just a hunch.
Quite frankly, I don't see how you arrive at the notion that the free press is a "division" of the military. The point of the authors is that reporters are potentially such a wild card against the soldiers they cover that there's a very real danger of them releasing information to the public that might get troops killed.
That's called "operational security."
Please do not disregard the fact that most commanders would do everything they could to exclude reporters from the fight if that meant they could assure operational security.
If they did that, I could see you saying, 'Well, that's just typical. They don't want the truth to come out about what they're doing!'
If they put reporters in a pool system that censors or delays content for operational security concerns, you would say, 'See, they don't want the full truth to come out about what they're doing.'
If a reporter embeds, then you say, 'Well, he's now part of the machine because he's going with the military on the invasion! He has access to the military, so he's compromised by them.'
If a reporter goes to Iraq as a unilateral, you will say, 'See, the military won't give her access because she's a unilateral! That just shows they don't want the truth to come out.'
If the unilateral publishes facts that cast the U.S. invasion in a good light -- thankful crowds cheering the demise of a brutal dictator; U.S. soldiers uncovering mass graves and rape rooms; a Shiite cleric who publicly thanks George W. Bush for invading -- then she's compromised because her paycheck comes from a corporation.
I guess that means NBC is scratching the name of Kevin Sites off their Christmas Card list.
It seems that anyone who bothered to cover this war, unless they made up crap or speculated a lot about things that never came true (I can think of two BBC and Guardian reporters who shall remain nameless), was somehow compromised.
Maybe your real beef is with the major media who failed to fully vet White House claims about weapons of mass destruction before the war, not the guys who covered the invasion?
Different beats. My job is to report on war, not the murky spy agencies or Oval Office wonks who take the political and diplomatic steps toward it. They weren't embedded at all, and look at the great job those reporters did. How did they serve the public?
The authors, it seems to me, sought to posit three "stakeholders" -- the military, the press and the public. Theoretically, the military serves both the press and the public.
The press, I think, serves only the public, although the Pentagon liked the PR value of readers and viewers seeing a highly competent, professional military at work.
In a capitalistic socieity, the public serves no one but themselves. Now, you can argue that this service ultimately benefits the mercantile elites, or the military, or whatever, but on a more practical level it's safe to say that news consumers pay with their wallets for a press that strives to be as objective as possible.
They liked the embedded reporting because, to them, it was an accurate evaluation of what transpired.
I will grant to you that in many ways this quest for objectivity is a phantom pursuit. We are all caged by history. But I find most combat correspondents aren't mouthpieces for the Pentagon. Hell, most of us aren't even American!
Posted by: Carl at December 15, 2004 10:09 AMWhen it comes to covering the war itself, I want the seasoned combat correspondent, even (maybe especially) the ex-Marine combat correspondent. I won't argue that people with direct experience of war will do a better job covering it in-country. But when it comes to the post-hoc analysis of how the reportage worked, and the merits of embedding vs other systems, I think I'd rather have the bow-tied professor, with tenure and independent funding, than the corporation with strong financial and operational ties to the military.
You wrote the public "liked the embedded reporting because, to them, it was an accurate evaluation of what transpired." I think that's a good characterization of what the general public thought, but I think they're wrong to believe it was "accurate" -- for all the reasons mentioned before, which boil down to the old saw "truth is the first casualty of war". I think it's important to remind ourselves of this frequently, especially as we're watching the live TV broadcasts from reporters who are right there as shit blows up. The immediacy of those images of exploding shells and sweaty grunts and night-vision camera shots lends them a false sense of authenticity, like you're seeing "the whole picture" when in fact you're just seeing a small, controlled corner.
Posted by: Chris at December 17, 2004 12:33 PMActually, the "small" corner is something I've written about, and it's certainly something that came up during the creation of the study by RAND. The authors took the position that not much journalistic worth was found is the live scenes in the desert. It lacked context.
I'm not sure it was a "false sense of authenticity," because it certainly was happening, live. I also would strongly dispute the adjective "controlled." It wasn't controlled, which is why it seemed so authentic, if not relevant.
This issue of "control" actually is what concerns the authors. For operational security to work, they fear that reporters could reveal too much about a battle before it begins, costing the lives of American combatants.
For the authors, the question is one of balance: How do you weigh the need for the public to see and understand what their military is doing in their name with the need for the military to fight battles.
This issue isn't relegated solely to the combat beat. Do reporters cross the yellow police tape at a murder? How close do the fire does the photographer get? Does the camera in the courtroom change the way juries contemplate the evidence?
The only things most embedded reporters were asked to do was (1) refrain from giving the exact position of troops in combat; and, (2) don't release the names of the dead or wounded you cover until their families are notified.
Those seem like pretty simple requests to me, ones that I've managed to follow no matter which army I've followed (and most have not been American).
Embedded reporters are not the only sources a newspaper should use when creating a front page. The wire should be used, because it pulls in sources from around the world, including Al J, not to mention Pentagon, UN and State Dept. correspondents most of the major dailies have.
But, again, it was this corps of journalists, and not the embedded reporters, who gave us WMD before the war, and Jessica Lynch during it.
As I recall, even if you didn't like it, it was the embedded reporter crew who debunked a lot of the crap being said about the war ("quagmire," "grinding to a halt," Lynch, WMDs everywhere). In large part, this was because many combat correspondents actually know something about combat, unlike a lot of Washington DC reporters who know a lot about Washington DC. There's nothing wrong with that, but when the shooting starts they probably should take a back seat to the pros.
The best part of the RAND study, I felt, was the historical synopsis of how we got to this place. If you read that, you will probably see why embedding reporters is a natural, albeit unsatisfactory, outcome from a dialectical clash between a free press and the military it hectors.