"You're at ground zero -- no one
with an ounce of sense is going to betray
sensitive information," says CNN's Walt Rodgers,
on the move in Iraq with the Army's 7th Cavalry.
Posted on 03/21/2003 10:17:48 PM PST by Pokey78
For Embedded Correspondents, the Small Picture Is Big News
Walt Rodgers, the veteran CNN correspondent traveling with the Army's 7th Cavalry, is so deeply embedded that he got to ride around the desert in an Abrams tank.
"Being inside the beast isn't so bad," he said yesterday by satellite phone from Iraq. "We're getting unbelievable access. I don't believe I've ever had such access over 36 years of reporting."
The Pentagon's decision to dispatch more than 500 journalists with U.S. forces has produced a wealth of riveting television pictures and a grunt's-eye view of the war, along with occasional moments of silliness.
Viewers have seen ABC's Ted Koppel with a line of hundreds of tanks crossing the Kuwaiti border into Iraq. CBS's Julie Chen emerging nervously from a bunker after a chemical-attack alert. Fox's Oliver North recalling how he was in a lieutenant colonel's "lead bird" when a helicopter behind them crashed, killing the 12 American and British occupants. Rodgers telling Wolf Blitzer it was "no big deal" as a shell exploded nearby.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
OK, will do. (Sorry I missed this til this morning.) I came into this with the same view of the press as General Sherman:
I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.
- Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
But on Feb. 28, I wrote the following post, in which I thought I might have figured out why we were doing this:
I've been a little bummed about the notion of 500 or so combat journalists, most of whom are undoubtedly young, liberal products of our nation's universities, and therefore out for a big story that makes them look good by criticizing the military, accompanying our troops into Iraq. In WW2 battlefield press was ok, because they were on our side. Now, they proclaim themselves to be neutral, while sometimes rooting for the other side.
I thought the Gulf War, in which the press was kept off the battlefield for the most part, was conducted correctly. Letting the press tag along behind, and accept the surrenders of Saddam's "elite" troops seemed the right way to do things.
The Pentagon surely remembers the lessons of Vietnam, and why they kept the press off the front lines last time. Therefore, I have been wondering why they would let these people interfere with their operations. I think I've figured it out though--
We want to scare the piss out of the world.
We want breathless accounts of the ease, horror and deadly efficiency with which we wage this war. We want live interviews with just-captured Iraqi soldiers describing their shock. We want it to be seen in Riyadh and Tehran and Beijing. That's what those 500 people are for.
Rumsfeld is damn shrewd.
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