The Grand Experiment of embedding journalists is now two weeks old. Journalists are jammed in military units up to their eyebrows. The journos have to supply their own vehicles and/or travel with the soldiers. They eat MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat, also know as Shit In A Bag) or chow at the military lines. The journos usually wear blue police-style body armour, but some are in camouflage with Kevlar helmets and Go-fast goggles. Odds are a few are carrying a sidearm, but are being discreet about it on camera.
Part of the deal is you grab sleep when you can, meaning when the troops laager for the night. Another part is you can only file and transmit when the military says go ahead and you are kindly instructed to keep your big mouth shut regarding where you are or what the boys and girls are going to do tomorrow. Some of the embedded journos are looking rough, away from the makeup, lighting and grooming so important to modern television image. Martin Savage and Ryan Chillcote from CNN both look like they’ve come through a two-week whiskey drunk, touring biker bars.
To my mind, embedding has worked reasonably well. The footage from Walter Rogers and John Roberts, from CNN and CBS respectively, of Mechanized units racing across the desert live and in living dark green and light green, was spectacular. Live war is astounding television, giving us a real-ish picture of what war kinda is. Keep in mind that there are reality filters in place, but it is awfully close to unfiltered.
When (hopefully, only If) we see live blood and guts, then it is completely unfiltered and real. With any luck most of the viewers will puke up their dinner, as the viewing of something like that is beyond the experience of almost all of us. That is how we should react if we ever see something that. Scream, puke, stare, pray. Television with Visceral Impact. Think along the lines of the feelings you felt when you saw the World Trade Center towers fall down.
Is the quality of the reporting suffering or being hindered by embedded journalists? No more than it was with pool reporting, in the Gulf War Version 1.0. In that show, the daily McNews Nugget was dutifully regurgitated back to the viewer, except for the first few nights when Shaw, Holliman and Arnett had the camera out the window of the hotel. Today, we get the real goods. If there is not much to see, there isn’t much to report. If there is lots to see, there is lots to report.
Spin doctoring, reality styling and information grooming is left to the analysts. Please remember that “anal” is the first part of ”analysts”. Not to suggest that they all speak out their assholes, but many do. The retired military men who analyze this stuff are quite informed and almost all of the good ones have pointed out that any battle plan is merely a sketch of what might come down and that goes out the window as soon as the gunfire starts. Now it is up to the feet on the street to figure out the rest.
So far, the feet on the street are doing a good job: Bad guys are being captured and killed. Baghdad is taking an infrastructure ass-walloping without killing a whole lot of civilians. Saddam Hussein is nowhere to be seen and his two sons Qusay and Bidet (or is that spelled Biday?) are staying low. The Republican Guards are running towards the front lines to fight, probably chased by the Fedayeen Saddam who are being chased by the Special Republican Guard, who are being pursued by the Special Iraqi Secret Service. Eventually they’ll all wind up at the front and pile into each other like the Marx Brothers chasing a car full of circus clowns, each group demanding the other fight first to demonstrate their loyalty.
Will there be another “Shock and Awe”? Yes there will and very soon all the pieces will be in place. Did General Tommy Franks have the exact date written down in the first draft of The Plan? Who cares?
Walter Cronkite had the best thought about it all: Preserve as much information as you can for the historical record and worry about the analysis after it is all over.
RoadDave 