Nora Ephron, for all her prodigious gifts as a writer, appears to have some trouble grasping the linear nature of time. In her latest item on the Huffington Post, Ephron summons her powers to dismiss the U.S. military’s “embed” program, which has allowed reporters almost unfettered access to the troops doing the fighting in Iraq, as a “diabolical and brilliant scheme, definitely one of the reasons why America marched off to this misguided venture as blindly and happily as it did.”
This is puzzling.
How does embedding with the troops after the invasion began relate to the run-up to war? Is Ephron suggesting that reporters were so eager to embed that they somehow fudged their prewar reporting to make the invasion more likely to happen? We’re pretty sure that isn’t what she means, but we remain a little confused as to what she is trying to get at here.
And what was the impetus for Ephron’s musing on the issue? The Tribeca Film Festival, where she attended a panel with Christopher Isham of ABC News, Jarhead author Anthony Swofford, Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief Aparsim Ghosh and Debra Scranton, director of the The War Tapes, a documentary filmed by American troops about the war in Iraq.
As for the embedding, Ephron writes that “the word is so harmless, like raisins in coffeecake. At the same time it’s so clearly, unambiguously frank and literal. How much more obvious can you be about what you’re up to? Because no question that once you embed someone, they’ve curled up with you, they’ve slept with you, they’ve gotten confused about where you begin and they end, and what’s more, they don’t seem to know they’ve been screwed. There’s a reason why journalists in Vietnam were quick to see that the war wasn’t working — they weren’t embedded. Embedding gives a reporter a grunt’s eye view of the war. A grunt almost never sees the big picture.”
We hate to burst Nora’s bubble here, but while it’s true that reporters in Vietnam were able to travel the country on their own, they still hooked up — and yes, embedded — with American military units. Kevin Buckley, former Newsweek bureau chief in Saigon during the war, has written about his experiences with the troops in the war, experiences that informed, rather than detracted from, his overall experience of the war. PBS, in an April 2000 report about the news coverage of Vietnam, also related stories about reporters spending time in the field with the grunts. Yet somehow they still managed to grasp the larger picture, just as reporters in Iraq are doing today.
And if Ephron thinks that reporters today are compromised by embedding in a way reporters of previous wars were not, she should consider the words of Wallace Terry, who covered the Vietnam war for Time magazine: “I had a serious identity relationship with the man in uniform,” he told PBS in 2000. “They were my fellow Americans; and I would not have reported anything or done anything that I thought would hurt or damage an operation where American lives were at risk.”
And it wasn’t just Vietnam. In World War II, reporters like Homer Bigart, Ernie Pyle, Walter Cronkite and Robert Capa all traveled with combat troops, and their work was similarly enhanced by embedding with the military.
It’s almost inarguable that living and traveling with military units during a war does create connection, which produces a natural disinclination to make the troops you’re with look bad. It’s just a fact that when you risk your life with a group of people, a bond is formed. There’s simply no way around it. We wonder if Ephron would fault this natural human emotion as some kind of dereliction of duty. Perhaps if she more carefully weighed the risks and rewards that come from living with a military unit in a hostile environment, or even understood the history of war reporting, she would change her tune.
Ephron concludes her piece by asking, “I couldn’t help wondering whether things might not have turned out differently if the press had refused to be embedded in the first place …”
The short answer of course, is that there is no way of knowing — but it’s hard to imagine what possible benefit the American public would have to gain by having reporters far from the action. At the outset of the war, there were plenty of reporters who attempted to cover the invasion unembedded, from Chris Allbritton to Michael Goldfarb, just to name two. Even today, some reporters are out there, flying without the safety net of the U.S. military, like Michael Totten, though they’re mostly, if not exclusively, in Kurdistan.
As we all know, after the war began reporters became targets, and aside from the relatively safe northern region of Kurdistan it was next to impossible to get much done if you weren’t embedded with the military — which leaves us more than a little confused about exactly what it is that Ephron is complaining about.
Embedding came about partly because the press complained after the Gulf War of being walled off from the action, and left at the mercy of military flacks and their PowerPoint presentations. In Iraq, the program has produced some wonderful reporting about the situation on the ground. Reporting that, given the asymmetrical nature of the war, could not be obtained in any other way.
We commend it to Ephron.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.