Among the Troops: Seeing the Iraq War Through Three Journalistic Vantage Points

Abstract

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Pentagon introduced a program journalists in military units. Embedded reporters have been widely criticized for allegedly failing to adequately cover effects of the war on Iraqi civilians, while over-emphasizing the personal lives of troops. Proponents of the embedding program argue that the program provides journalists with a detailed understanding of military culture and life on the frontline. In addition to the embedded reporters, some journalists were stationed in Baghdad and others were independent and free to roam. I argue that these three journalistic vantage points channeled reporters toward particular news content, while limiting their access to others. I hypothesize that while embedded reporters effectively presented the military experience of the war and the Baghdad-stationed reporters successfully covered the Iraqi experience of the war, the independent reporters were able to provide the most balanced coverage of the war. I demonstrate that despite the largely one-sided story presented, articles by embedded journalists were both more prominent and more widely available than coverage from other vantage points. Due to the dominance of embedded reporting, I conclude by noting that the majority of war coverage in print media heavily emphasized the soldier's experience of the war, while downplaying the effects of the invasion on the Iraqi people. By conducting a content analysis of 742 print news articles by 156 journalists from the major combat period of the war, this study offers one of the first systematic documentations of the substantive content of Iraq war coverage.