Embedding

Embedding

By Tanja Thomas and Fabian Virchow

[This article originally published in: Oissietzky 2003 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://sopos.org/aufsaetze/3f4fabc99421e/1.phtml.]

References to cooperation between the military and the cultural scene are striking in the media. The producer Jerry Bruckheimer of the recent Somalia tragedy “Black Hawk Down” was supported by the Pentagon. On a US aircraft carrier, he celebrated the premier of his box office hit on Pearl Harbor. We dedicate ourselves to such “militainment” and its allied interests and structures in forms of military-cultural cooperation in the US and Germany and social militarization. Now we focus on the “embedding” of journalists and its prehistory.

Since Woodrow Wilson introduced the “Committee for Public Information” during the 1st World War, governments and the military have attempted to regulate the manner and extent of reporting. In the course of decades, they modified the concepts and rules again and again on the basis of experiences in crisis- and war-times. After many in the US military made the media responsible for the defeat in Vietnam, journalists have been restricted in military actions since the 1980s in Grenada 1983, Panama 1989 and Afghanistan where access to information and pictures was intensely restricted and controlled. The journalist pool arranged by the US army in the second 1991 Gulf war and during the war in Afghanistan was characteristic. A carefully selected group of media persons was given a privileged access to information.

The “boot-camps” as training camps for war journalists offered for some years by the US army and the German army show a change in public relations work in war times. These bootcamps are the presupposition of the “embedding” of journalists. In the Vietnam war, journalists could join troops without strict conditions. The Pentagon recognized that video recordings from combat bombers or satellite-guided missiles were not enough to satisfy information needs. The world public should now have a place in the first row to organize solidarity at the home front and demonstrate military strength in the occupied countries.

The idea of “embedding” comes from Victoria “Torie” Clarke who is responsible for Public Affairs in the Department of Defense and previously worked for the Hill & Knowlton agency. To justify the second Gulf war, this PR-agency devised the story that Iraqi soldiers took babies from incubators in Kuwait and killed them. As proposed by the assistant secretary, the Pentagon chose 600 media representatives (including 30 Germans) who may work “embedded” after signing the “grounded rules agreement” regulating in 50 points what war reporters may and may not discuss. Five to six PR-officers work in the divisions as persons in charge of embedded journalists. At the same time working conditions of reporters who didn’t want to take this front-seat perspective were aggravated. The British daily paper Independent quoted a British army spokesperson: “It is my job to make life as hard as possible for you free journalists.” Some observers have also interpreted the shelling of the Baghdad hotel “Palestine” where most of the non-embedded journalists were lodged (two were killed, several injured) as deterrence- and intimidation measures of the Americans against reporters who didn’t submit. The invading troops attacked the offices of the broadcast stations Al Dschasira and Abu Dhabi TV.

The pictures of the Iraq war were weapons of psychological warfare. The dramatized impressions of the embedded were occasionally very surreal… The US army spread pictures of the supposed rescue of the soldier Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital. What was presented as a “bold raid” and recalled Hollywood plots later turned out to be a staged military operation in which other patients were shocked and Iraqi doctors who fought for the life of the soldier were harassed. That the US military in shooting this action drew parallels to the film “Black Hawk Down” is more than an accident. Besides the concepts and guidelines of the armed forces for dealing with media representatives, the long-term interest in the cooperation of military institutions and actors with the media- or entertainment industry is also effective in peace times. The US broadcast station NBC has already announced the filming of the “rescue” of Jessica Lynch.

Thus the boundaries between war- and peace times are blurred. How the military, media and the cultural scene cooperate in looking after the troops at the front and how these connections affect society will be themes of our next article.