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TAPACHULA, Mexico – The migrant caravan headed here to the US is starting to weaken as some tired, hungry, and sick travelers are deciding to return home. But roughly 5,000 people are pressing on. Some are asking questions about who is in the caravan, so CBN News asked our contributing correspondent Chuck Holton to check it out. He caught up with the caravan in the Mexican city of Tapachula. "I want to try and clarify some of what you've been hearing in the news media about this caravan moving north into the United States. First of all, the people in...

The best war journalist of our time has been kicked out of Afghanistan... Let the administration boot Helen Thomas out of her seat in the front of a White House press conference and there would be outrage. Remove Jonathan Karl from the Capitol and media would revolt. Kick Andrea Kremer off Sunday Night Football and there would be pandemonium. And yet nobody in the media seems to have much of a problem with Michael Yon being removed from the front lines by Obama/General McChrystal. Yon has openly stated the problems in Afghanistan right now and how we could lose...

A photographer who published pictures of dead U.S. Marines on his blog says his post led him to be ejected from his U.S. military embed in Iraq. Freelance photojournalist Zoriah says he does not believe he violated any of the rules of his embed agreement. But he says Marine commanders were so upset by his photos last month that they promptly arranged for a convoy to take him back to Baghdad. He decided to return home to the U.S. several days later. Speaking to PDN from Colorado this week, Zoriah (whose full name is Zoriah Miller but who uses only...

NEW YORK -- Evan Wright had no idea what he was getting into when he was assigned to travel with the Marine’s 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in the first weeks of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. When Wright, then a correspondent for Rolling Stone, was picked to ride with the special forces unit, the other reporters gathered at the Kuwait Hilton to find out where they would be embedded "looked at me with sheer hatred and envy," he said. "I didn't know what 1st Recon was, but if all of these reporters look so jealous, it must be a good spot,"...

Operation Iraqi Freedom saw the advent of a practice that revolutionized modern war reporting: the embedding of journalists with frontline combat units in war..."We were offered an irresistible opportunity: free transportation to the front line of the war, dramatic pictures, dramatic sounds, great quotes," said Tom Gjelten of National Public Radio. "Who can pass that up?" ... The most spectacular recent case of a journalist with an antiwar mindset being completely overwhelmed into a change of heart by American soldiers, according to the public affairs officer, was a Greek public television reporter who had been embedded with an infantry unit...

Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) saw the advent of a practice which revolutionized modern war reporting: the embedding of journalists with frontline combat units in war. This practice gave the media, the American public, and the world unprecedented access to the soldiers on the front lines, as well as to the war itself, through the filing of stories, photographs, and video from the battlefront in real time, by reporters who were right there with the soldiers doing the fighting. "We were offered an irresistible opportunity: free transportation to the front line of the war, dramatic pictures, dramatic sounds, great quotes," said...

The number of embeds in Iraq is so small it's grotesque. During the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, more than 600 reporters, TV crews and photographers were embedded with Coalition Forces, according to the Associated Press. Last year, during the vote to ratify a new constitution, there were 114. At the end of September, there only 11 and one of them was me. As I've observed elsewhere, embeds offer a unique perspective on the war in that they're actually viewing it. Contrast this with the MSM Baghdad press corps that bizarrely believes it can cover a country of 26 million...

NEW YORK — A cameraman and soundman for CBS were killed and a CBS correspondent was seriously injured Monday after their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb in Iraq, the network said.Veteran cameraman Paul Douglas, 48, and soundman James Brolan, 42, were killed, CBS reported on its Web site. Correspondent Kimberly Dozier, 39, was in critical condition at a U.S. military hospital in Baghdad after undergoing surgery. The three were reporting on patrol with the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, when their convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device, CBS said.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - CBS News said Monday that two of its crew members were killed in an attack on a U.S. military unit in Iraq. Correspondent Kimberly Dozier was seriously wounded, the network said. The network identified the dead as cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan. The three journalists were embedded with a team from the Fourth Infantry Division when the convoy was struck by an improvised explosive device on Monday, CBS said.

CBS/AP) Two London-based members of the CBS News team, veteran cameraman Paul Douglas, 48, and soundman James Brolan, 42, were killed and correspondent Kimberly Dozier, 39, was seriously injured Monday when the Baghdad military unit in which they were imbedded was attacked. They were reporting on patrol with the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, when their convoy was struck by an improvised explosive device (IED). The attack was among a slew of car and roadside bombs left about three dozen people dead before noon Monday, including one explosion that killed 10 people on a bus. Nearly all the...

"Tainted" Embeds and the role of MilBloggers One of the big issues at the MiBlogger Conference was, of course, bias in the media. While there are those who will contest such claims, it seems pretty clear to Murdoc that (at the very least) the mainstream media suffers from gross ignorance of military strategy, tactics, and history. This, of course, is gross generalization, and there are exceptions to the rule. But the low number of exceptions do a lot to prove said rule. The mainstream media suffers from gross ignorance of military strategy, tactics, and history.The third panel at the conference,...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version April 07, 2006, 5:21 a.m. Your Own Lying Eyes Why aren’t reporters embedded with new Iraqi forces? On March 26, an Iraqi special-forces unit attacked a building on the outskirts of northeast Baghdad, where they had tracked a group of terrorists. They had good reason to do so, because three members of the unit had been kidnapped by the terrorists, and were savagely tortured and killed. Their fingers and toes were cut off, their joints were penetrated with an electric drill, and they were eviscerated while still alive. It later...

American troops are developing a hate-hate relation with journalists. The basic problem is that soldiers and marines in Iraq have access, usually via the Internet, to what the mass media is saying about what they think is happening in Iraq. These news reports, all too often, do not reflect what the troops experience. It gets uglier when the troops realize that reporters are spending most of their time in the Green Zone or some well guarded hotel, leaving it to local Iraqi stringers to collect information and photos for the reporters stories. Relations are a bit better with the few...

...The advance of technology is forcing a greater information flow. Internet blogs are appearing in countries where the press is still controlled by the government. Pro-democracy forces are communicating by email, pagers and blackberries. As more citizens gain access to new forms of information, to new ways of learning of the outside world, it will be that much more difficult for governments to cement their rule by holding monopolies on news and commentary.... • First, government officials will need to communicate clearly and often. When a government official is found to have put out information that is not exactly correct...

Five Embeds Booted Out of Iraq in Recent Months credit: Aya Kawano By Joe Strupp Published: January 07, 2005 11:20 AM ET NEW YORK As Iraq moves closer to its first democratic elections later this month, the number of news organizations requesting embedded slots with military units there is on the rise, according to officials. But those new embeds better watch their step. E&P has learned that five journalists have been kicked out of embed slots in the past three months for reporting secure information. "They were all for operational security reasons, (revealing) something that would have been of use...

The current war in Iraq and operations in Afghanistan, my personal recollections and the television interviews with veterans from wars past remind me of the adage that the more things change the more they remain the same. There is an incredible outpouring of support from the home front to our men and women under fire way over there. Bumper stickers, websites, and Herculean efforts from organizations and private citizens have all converged to send support, love, prayers and badly needed personal comfort items to our warriors. Don’t think for a minute that these efforts are not deeply and personally appreciated...

n their latest campaign to eradicate Jihadi vermin on the Iraqi warfront with Jihadistan, U.S. Marines and Army infantry have, in the last two weeks, purged Fallujah of more than 5,000 terrorist insurgents who were dug in throughout the city. The combat has been fierce. A week into the Fallujah operation, an NBC photographer embedded with the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, recorded video of a young combat-hardened Marine entering a room in a mosque where he found several insurgents on the floor under covers. Unable to determine if these enemy combatants were injured, dead or preparing to ambush his...

NEW YORK The embeds are back. With a U.S. military assault on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah pending, there has been a surge in news organizations seeking embedded slots with the Marine unit there, Pentagon officials told E&P today. All 70 embed slots with the First Marine Expeditionary Force were filled two days ago, according to Sgt. Eric Grill of the Press Information Center in Baghdad. That same Marine unit had only 15 embeds just one month ago. "It's filled up," Grill told E&P Friday. "There are no more slots." Embedded journalists in Iraq, which topped 800 at the height of...

A year ago, the Pentagon took what many people considered to be a giant risk when it embedded reporters with U.S. units during the march to Baghdad. Old-timers remembered the acrimonious depths to which military-media relations had fallen in the aftermath of Vietnam. The fact was that for a very long time after that conflict, military members believed in their hearts that reporters were part of the counter-culture trying to "get them." Accordingly, the military limited press access to battlefields for over two decades. The embedding experiment worked — at least for a while. Unfortunately, the media seem to have...

Today: March 20, 2004 at 4:55:47 PST Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on IraqBy MIELIKKI ORGASSOCIATED PRESS BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - Competitive pressures and a fear of appearing unpatriotic discouraged journalists from doing more critical reporting during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, according to reporters and others at a conference on media coverage of the war. The journalists on the panels at the University of California at Berkeley this week blamed the Bush administration for leaking faulty information, but said the media also has itself to blame for not being more skeptical about the case for war. "The press...