I'd change my opinion if truly controversial stuff ever came from embedded journalism, but I've never seen an example. Sure, there's stuff that people will object to and find disturbing, but there's never been any sort of a smoking gun or scandal revealed by American embedded war journalism. It's sanitized in the extreme, in my opinion. I allow for the possibility that I'm wrong, but I'm extremely skeptical.
Uh well there could also be no smoking gun for them to discover haha. I think mass journalism is pretty frigged up but I'd figure its relative "lightness" has more to do w/ the nature of maintaining profitability and not ostracizing advertisers than a direct conspiracy to serve up propaganda.
Which is why I said I'm open to the possibility of being mistaken, but I'm EXTREMELY skeptical. I think my skepticism is even more justified after the Snowden leaks. It turns out that an awful lot of stuff that's long been dismissed as being tin foil hat territory is, well look at that, actually going on.
Well, I'm open to the possibility of being wrong about embedded journos being groomed, but I'm not open to the possibility of being wrong that the news we get on TV is carefully filtered to serve the interests of the wealthy bankrolling the stations. That's a given, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm sure I could come up with examples of "smoking guns" in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts that only got reported after they were leaked, but it would be essentially impossible to prove that any embedded journo ever knew about any given one.
Obviously that doesn't make every shadowy theory about the government and corruption real, but it does give a little vindication to people who say that if it benefits them, there's a good chance they're doing it.
Look at what happened to Occupy. It barely made it onto the television. There were documented cases of agent provocateurs in the crowd trying to escalate protests so that the police could seem justified in use of force, etc. Controlling the message is in the interest of the government and the 1% who bankroll their bribes... uhh.. contributions.
Turns out that when you give people billions of dollars and the lifestyle of royalty, they tend to try to act like royalty in order to keep it. Who knew.
So... sure, embedded war correspondents could be the most objective, unforgiving, unbiased people on the planet, but I don't think so. War is first about vested interests and dollars and humanitarian justification gets thought up afterward. We didn't even get into WW2 until we were directly attacked.
Anyway, I'm on oxycodone for what is almost certainly a broken rib and I can't be expected to make tight arguments right now, so enjoy this stream of consciousness. Still, though, it's not that crazy to say that insanely wealthy and powerful people use their insane wealth and power to advance their interests, and the US military has demonstrably been a tool of theirs for some time.
Does the military do some good in the world? Sure it does. Incidental heartwarming stories come out of just about every conflict ever, because people in isolation are usually GOOD people, but there's a reason that the US spends more on their armed forces than the next 26 countries combined, and it's not for humanitarian reasons.
LOL@the assertion that Larry King is mainstream media, and if you're going to use Assange as an example of somebody who wasn't character assassinated and the subject of unrelenting US propaganda in an attempt to utterly discredit him, then... wow. WOW.
The problem with embedded war reporting is that it's changed news from the documentation of a complex and violent conflict to human interest reality TV; The Real Soldiers of America, fighting an enemy who might as well be the orcs of Mordor. We get a loose narrative a small groups of weary, heroic individuals dealing with roadside bombs, gun fights and the fog of war. Their stories end with tearful reunions or as part of a montage of wounded in a hospital (maybe with a followup of them with space age looking prosthetics, doing inspiring things) or dead, grieved by wailing families and their buddies with hard yet red eyes, tears cutting paths on their dusty cheeks.
Corruption, massacres, torture, rape, collateral damage, suicide, PTSD, stupidity, hypocrisy? We don't have any serious primary sources so we've assembled a panel of serious people, selected based on our understanding of you as a demographic, to argue about it. Partisan axe grinding? Enemy propaganda? Meaningless anecdotes? Actually a big deal? YOU to decide! Take part in the conversation on Twitter with #warisbadmaybe! Don't listen to those other news guys, they're NUTS. Go us! Boo them! Drink your Ovaltine!
Cut to footage of drone strikes with an accentless news reporter announcing that Abu al-Whatever, a high ranking terrorist, was killed with a number of militants, followed by a suicide attack on a market, followed by a valley being retaken, followed by a rally of angry brown people, followed by a man in a suit saying things about democracy, on and on the forever war rolls. Just the way of things.
Occupy was all over the damn news my dude!!Also yes the wealthy do frigged up stuff, but I really don't think theres as much of a conspiracy to squelch war reporters as there is simply a depressing intersection between capitalist profit motive and consumer apathy.
So you don't think that embedded journalists are selected carefully, and you don't think that the guys they basically become coworkers in the extreme with (surviving a war together tends to make for some pretty strong bonds I'd imagine) pretty much de facto groom them? No, not going back on my point.
These days, the journos tend to apply for the positions(though that can vary, sometimes they're picked - by their employer, not the US government), but what is more carefully picked is what unit they end up embedded with. You're not going to stick a journo in with Delta or the SEALS, you stick them in with your regular units, doing regular patrols. Maybe if something interesting is happening, they MIGHT be attached to a support unit, or taken to an observation post, if there is one. But mostly, nothing scandalous really happens, and your chances of encountering anything is pretty low, no matter how controlled or uncontrolled it is.
I'd change my opinion if truly controversial stuff ever came from embedded journalism, but I've never seen an example. Sure, there's stuff that people will object to and find disturbing, but there's never been any sort of a smoking gun or scandal revealed by American embedded war journalism. It's sanitized in the extreme, in my opinion. I allow for the possibility that I'm wrong, but I'm extremely skeptical.
I don't think you do, considering you're already dismissing the possibility of there being nothing to report in the way of scandals, and only considering that since it's not reported, therefore the journalists must be compromised, or that their reportage is being modified for propaganda purposes.
That is literally conspiracy theory stuff - what you think is happening isn't happening, so instead of saying "It's not happening", you're saying "It must be a cover up."
Seriously - War is, in the day to day doing of the thing, by all reports pretty boring. You eat, you sleep, you clean your weapon, you exercise, you clean your weapon, you jack off, you clean your weapon, you go on patrol, maybe something happens, maybe it doesn't(and combat is hardly a scandal in a war-zone), you head back to base, you experiment with new and interesting ways to jack off, you talk shit with your buddies, you have a bitch about...basically everything. It's not an action movie thriller smash hit of the summer. There's not scandals and dark secrets and horrible atrocities plastered all over the calendar with a trowel, by most reports, the only things that are found everywhere as a constant over there are sand, dirt, and boredom.
I'm sure I could come up with examples of "smoking guns" in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts that only got reported after they were leaked, but it would be essentially impossible to prove that any embedded journo ever knew about any given one.
wat. The smoking guns of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts had nothing to do with embeds, because they weren't even uncovered by combat troops. They were uncovered by leaks of intelligence documents that combat troops never had anything to do with in the first place. The times where something non-intelligence was uncovered by the leaks, it wasn't uncovered by an embed because there weren't any present, barring the one that was killed during the firefight shown in the(heavily edited) collateral murder video.
I would ask what you're suggesting, but I don't give a damn, because it's already insane. This would require the US government at multiple levels to have explicit and exacting knowledge about which units would and would not get into random firefights, ambushes and the like, what mistakes they would make and who would kill who - before any of it ever happened, often months in advance when the embed starts. It would also require them ahead of time to know precisely what scandals will occur, down to the individual level of soldiers doing fucked up things and all the way up to the grand revelations about the US's war in the middle east, and then instead of stopping it, just carefully maneuvering journalists on embeds away from them, and hoping that the freelancers they can't control don't get a whiff of it and go looking.
I'm skeptical because there was a massive propaganda campaign, some of it grass roots, some of it not, to elevate soldiers in the US to demi-god status, practically, after the Vietnam war. I think a lot of this happened because wealthy in the US with international, borderline imperialist interests saw the tide in this country turning against a large, "world police" style military, and they weren't about to have that.
Was there genuine grass roots support for supporting US troops and reversing the trend of soldiers returning home to be called baby killers and dupes and monsters? Sure, no doubt at all. But I think that an awful lot of moneyed interests were certainly interested in and alarmed by that particular cultural shift as well. Can't have Americans losing their taste for war. Swinging our heavily armed dick around is how we prop up our one-way consumer economy.
I'm also skeptical because it's been demonstrated that our government security/intelligence apparatus has no trouble at all breaking the law both domestically and internationally in pursuit of interests that are arguably not the American people's at large. I think it's a very short walk to become also very skeptical of the military and the manner in which we receive information about our military.
Foreign news sources reporting US military atrocities are almost universally dismissed as having an agenda, faking footage, photos, etc. So.. why do we trust what we're told so much?
Our presidential election is decided in many (most?) states by electronic voting machines with no credible audit trail and little or no oversight. Campaign contributions by massive corporations are just considered how the system works. Sure there's some screaming, but nothing changes.
I don't know where you all get your unquestioning faith in the way the US government and military operate, but I sure don't share it.
>I would ask what you're suggesting, but I don't give a damn, because it's already insane. This would require the US government at multiple levels to have explicit and exacting knowledge about which units would and would not get into random firefights, ambushes and the like, what mistakes they would make and who would kill who - before any of it ever happened,
I cannot fathom how you got this interpretation out of anything I said. And no, don't blame the painkillers, because this is a complete non sequitur in the context of this discussion. It is in no way necessary for the US government or military or commanding officers in the field to shuffle embedded reporters away from "crime scenes" or whatever you want to call them in anything that I've argued.
In any case, getting around back to my point, which really shouldn't be all that controversial, is that there is basically no reason to trust the reporting we receive from embedded reporters (or really almost any mainstream media when it comes to war). It's often not corroborated by any third party. Much of it is not verifiable for the majority of human beings on the planet. People who attempt to demonstrate that there is contradictory evidence are almost universally accused of being conspiracy theorists. It really comes down to "How much do you trust the US government and the US military to be earnest, forthcoming, and honest at LEAST about issues or events that do not directly impact national security in a material way?" and for me, the answer is "Not very much, in light of what I know about the apparent contempt that related US govt agencies have for American citizens." It's not so much "I know what they're doing and it's terrible, here, have all of my evidence." as "They haven't given me many reasons to trust them and so I don't."
Where "them" is the US military apparatus, and not any particular embedded journalist, embedded journalists in general, etc. I doubt that most journalists go out to a warzone thinking "Boy I can't wait to sell this war to the people back home." I do think that there's a pretty well established culture in the military as a whole that filters and spit polishes the news that escapes from it. Not very many people have to be intentionally or maliciously misrepresenting anything in order for it to occur.
Shit, look at the volume of stories about the bullshit that goes on with US military recruiters. A google search will give you a month's reading. The US military is a body devoted to throwing its weight around at home and abroad, and that includes selling itself. Constantly.
I cannot fathom how you got this interpretation out of anything I said. And no, don't blame the painkillers, because this is a complete non sequitur in the context of this discussion. It is in no way necessary for the US government or military or commanding officers in the field to shuffle embedded reporters away from "crime scenes" or whatever you want to call them in anything that I've argued.
I blame the painkillers for the fact you're trying to use reddit quoting for a vanilla forum quote, though.
And yes, you did - you argued that none of the scandals that have come out of the war have come from embedded journalists, and that this bolsters your idea that the whole thing is sanitized propaganda.
Some of those scandals would be impossible to come from embeds, and others come from units that had no embeds.
For that to be planned - and therefore be part of the process of sensitization and propaganda that you think is the case - the government would be required to be incredible prescient, because they'd have to ensure that no scandalous actions that occur as a result of anything at all(ie, soldiers crushing a family car with a tank, or the collateral murder video) never occurred in the presence of embedded journalists, or that somehow the US government could cover up said incidents that occurred around embeds, despite the US government's habit of leaking like a sieve.
That's not what I said though. I said I'm skeptical, not that it proves a thing. It's one variable in a whole. You chose to pick it out and try to dismantle an argument I'm not making.
I'm not really making a whole lot of an argument here. It's more of a long winded comment: "I don't trust the US military to reliably report its activities a whole lot more (if any more) than I trust the NSA to behave."
As far as I'm concerned, it's just another head on the beast with little accountability and answering primarily to special interests and not the American people, who have a choice of Republican or Republican-lite when they go vote on machines that don't give them a receipt.
In the run-up to the Iraq War, CNN broadcast detailed diagrams and 3D models of mobile chemical weapons labs being used by Saddam's forces in Iraq that DID NOT EXIST. Of course, Bush and friends had deniability because they were listening to their intelligence agencies and consultants. Oh wait... we've learned that those intelligence agencies are corrupt as shit. Oh noes. On and on.
When the military gives me a reason to trust a single word uttered about them by television or any other mainstream news outlet ever again, I'll reconsider.
I can't argue that I'm not all over the place, but hey, oxy (which incidentally has done fuck-all for the pain from this broken rib but sure has got me feeling doped as hell.)
In the run-up to the Iraq War, CNN broadcast detailed diagrams and 3D models of mobile chemical weapons labs being used by Saddam's forces in Iraq that DID NOT EXIST. Of course, Bush and friends had deniability because they were listening to their intelligence agencies and consultants. Oh wait... we've learned that those intelligence agencies are corrupt as shit. Oh noes. On and on.
So, what in the fuck does that have to do with Embeds, considering that it involves politicians and intelligence organizations, and not Embeds and the combat troops they work with?
When the military gives me a reason to trust a single word uttered about them by television or any other mainstream news outlet ever again, I'll reconsider.
And here we come down to the crux of the matter. You're not skeptical, you're playing at being skeptical. You have your conclusion, and you're giving lip service to the idea of changing your mind, but as long as you can explain away anything to the contrary, you won't change your mind. You don't actually know very much of anything about Embeds, correspondents or the like, you're just guessing, to put it politely.
And just how did you break your rib, anyway? That sounds like an interesting story.
I'm not playing at being skeptical. I'm skeptical. What do you think the requirements are for being skeptical of a government as a whole that is constantly crafting soundbites, outright lying, spying on its own citizens, spying on the heads of state of our allies (and lying about it), etc. Why is it somehow stubborn or crazy to look at the reporting that comes out of a government program with a heavy dose of doubt?
Embeds are basically honorary US soldiers, are you going to deny that? C'mon. Is your best friend an embedded war reporter or something? I wasn't looking to pick particularly on embeds in the first place. I mentioned them almost off hand as an example of a source I have difficulty assigning veracity to, and then admittedly I probably hyperfocused on them after you or Andrew singled it out because, seriously, doped as shit over here.
I'm actually more concerned about the lack of independent journalists on their own recognizance than I am about embeds, but I think the rise of the latter (obviously) precipitated the decline of the former. I feel as though reporting from embeds is not corroborated well (or at all) and can't possibly avoid being influenced by a sense of camaraderie.
The story of the rib is a boring one. I have osteoporosis from 3 decades of chronic steroid use due to Crohn's disease. For the past few weeks, I've had an extremely aggressive and forceful cough that my doctor believes may even be pertussis (Whooping Cough). Evidently one or more of my very forceful, racking coughs broke one of my poor, spongy ribs. It hurts like a motherfucker.
I'm going tomorrow for chest x-rays to confirm that's what it is. The pain is all in my upper right chest and almost feels like a muscle pull except FAR more acute and the range of motion of my arm is totally unaffected.
That was a pretty good episode. The more recent ones have been pretty good, too. Almost everything from seasons 11 through 20 is a slog, though. Even so, it's still better than 90% of what's on TV.
Of course they do. No doubt about it. And yet, they got out there and did it, in lots of wars.
I'm not judging anybody for choosing a safer option when the stakes are literally their lives, but that doesn't mean I can't be skeptical about the quality of the reporting that comes out of it.
Your skepticism of the reporting coming from embedded journalists is misplaced. As has been pointed out previously they are not embedded with units that are in a position to do the things you are seeking to see them report on. It is like you are complaining about the local school reporter because he focuses on who won the local football game and ignores what is going on at the school 100 miles away where there is no school reporter.
Your problem appears to be with the people in charge of embedding reporters.
You're mischaracterizing my argument but I'm not going to keep trying to clarify it.
I already said about four times up above that my issue isn't so much with embedded reporters as with the absence of independent reporting, which is at least in part the case BECAUSE of the perception/pretense/whatever that embedded reporting is adequate.
Thats one thing I miss about modern conflicts, they lack the art work, poetry and literature of wars like Waterloo, Crimea, Hastings, that sort of thing.
A lot of that art came after, or for official reasons, but even so your point is flawed. The Bayeux Tapestry was probably made decades after the event, though the exact dating is unsure. The Charge of The Light Brigade poem was only written so quickly as Tennyson was the Poet Laureate, and it was his job to write poems about current events.
Now think about the Vietnam war. Do you think Apocalypse Now is any less of a work of art than the Charge of the Light Brigade? What about The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty, pretty impressive works of art about ongoing current conflicts?
Movies and video games are the most expensive art forms to make, yet also the most accessible to the masses. That was the place of poetry, painting and sculpture in the 19th century. I think the representations of modern conflicts are covered just fine.
Ukrainian troops said they were being attacked by Russian forces and one soldier, Interfax news agency said quoting a Ukrainian military spokesman.
“One Ukrainian serviceman has been wounded in the neck and collarbone. Now we have barricaded ourselves on the second floor. The headquarters has been taken and the commander has been taken. They want us to put down our arms but we do not intend to surrender,” he said.
“We are being stormed. We have about 20 people here and about 10 to 15 others, including women,” an unidentified serviceman told Fifth Channel television. “One of our officers was wounded during the attack, grazed in the neck and arm.”
Comments
Well, I'm open to the possibility of being wrong about embedded journos being groomed, but I'm not open to the possibility of being wrong that the news we get on TV is carefully filtered to serve the interests of the wealthy bankrolling the stations. That's a given, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm sure I could come up with examples of "smoking guns" in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts that only got reported after they were leaked, but it would be essentially impossible to prove that any embedded journo ever knew about any given one.
Obviously that doesn't make every shadowy theory about the government and corruption real, but it does give a little vindication to people who say that if it benefits them, there's a good chance they're doing it.
Look at what happened to Occupy. It barely made it onto the television. There were documented cases of agent provocateurs in the crowd trying to escalate protests so that the police could seem justified in use of force, etc. Controlling the message is in the interest of the government and the 1% who bankroll their bribes... uhh.. contributions.
Turns out that when you give people billions of dollars and the lifestyle of royalty, they tend to try to act like royalty in order to keep it. Who knew.
So... sure, embedded war correspondents could be the most objective, unforgiving, unbiased people on the planet, but I don't think so. War is first about vested interests and dollars and humanitarian justification gets thought up afterward. We didn't even get into WW2 until we were directly attacked.
Anyway, I'm on oxycodone for what is almost certainly a broken rib and I can't be expected to make tight arguments right now, so enjoy this stream of consciousness. Still, though, it's not that crazy to say that insanely wealthy and powerful people use their insane wealth and power to advance their interests, and the US military has demonstrably been a tool of theirs for some time.
Does the military do some good in the world? Sure it does. Incidental heartwarming stories come out of just about every conflict ever, because people in isolation are usually GOOD people, but there's a reason that the US spends more on their armed forces than the next 26 countries combined, and it's not for humanitarian reasons.
Corruption, massacres, torture, rape, collateral damage, suicide, PTSD, stupidity, hypocrisy? We don't have any serious primary sources so we've assembled a panel of serious people, selected based on our understanding of you as a demographic, to argue about it. Partisan axe grinding? Enemy propaganda? Meaningless anecdotes? Actually a big deal? YOU to decide! Take part in the conversation on Twitter with #warisbadmaybe! Don't listen to those other news guys, they're NUTS. Go us! Boo them! Drink your Ovaltine!
Cut to footage of drone strikes with an accentless news reporter announcing that Abu al-Whatever, a high ranking terrorist, was killed with a number of militants, followed by a suicide attack on a market, followed by a valley being retaken, followed by a rally of angry brown people, followed by a man in a suit saying things about democracy, on and on the forever war rolls. Just the way of things.
That is literally conspiracy theory stuff - what you think is happening isn't happening, so instead of saying "It's not happening", you're saying "It must be a cover up."
Seriously - War is, in the day to day doing of the thing, by all reports pretty boring. You eat, you sleep, you clean your weapon, you exercise, you clean your weapon, you jack off, you clean your weapon, you go on patrol, maybe something happens, maybe it doesn't(and combat is hardly a scandal in a war-zone), you head back to base, you experiment with new and interesting ways to jack off, you talk shit with your buddies, you have a bitch about...basically everything. It's not an action movie thriller smash hit of the summer. There's not scandals and dark secrets and horrible atrocities plastered all over the calendar with a trowel, by most reports, the only things that are found everywhere as a constant over there are sand, dirt, and boredom. wat. The smoking guns of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts had nothing to do with embeds, because they weren't even uncovered by combat troops. They were uncovered by leaks of intelligence documents that combat troops never had anything to do with in the first place. The times where something non-intelligence was uncovered by the leaks, it wasn't uncovered by an embed because there weren't any present, barring the one that was killed during the firefight shown in the(heavily edited) collateral murder video.
I would ask what you're suggesting, but I don't give a damn, because it's already insane. This would require the US government at multiple levels to have explicit and exacting knowledge about which units would and would not get into random firefights, ambushes and the like, what mistakes they would make and who would kill who - before any of it ever happened, often months in advance when the embed starts. It would also require them ahead of time to know precisely what scandals will occur, down to the individual level of soldiers doing fucked up things and all the way up to the grand revelations about the US's war in the middle east, and then instead of stopping it, just carefully maneuvering journalists on embeds away from them, and hoping that the freelancers they can't control don't get a whiff of it and go looking. Tip - don't argue with people when you're off your face. Wait till you come down, then argue.
Was there genuine grass roots support for supporting US troops and reversing the trend of soldiers returning home to be called baby killers and dupes and monsters? Sure, no doubt at all. But I think that an awful lot of moneyed interests were certainly interested in and alarmed by that particular cultural shift as well. Can't have Americans losing their taste for war. Swinging our heavily armed dick around is how we prop up our one-way consumer economy.
I'm also skeptical because it's been demonstrated that our government security/intelligence apparatus has no trouble at all breaking the law both domestically and internationally in pursuit of interests that are arguably not the American people's at large. I think it's a very short walk to become also very skeptical of the military and the manner in which we receive information about our military.
Foreign news sources reporting US military atrocities are almost universally dismissed as having an agenda, faking footage, photos, etc. So.. why do we trust what we're told so much?
Our presidential election is decided in many (most?) states by electronic voting machines with no credible audit trail and little or no oversight. Campaign contributions by massive corporations are just considered how the system works. Sure there's some screaming, but nothing changes.
I don't know where you all get your unquestioning faith in the way the US government and military operate, but I sure don't share it.
I cannot fathom how you got this interpretation out of anything I said. And no, don't blame the painkillers, because this is a complete non sequitur in the context of this discussion. It is in no way necessary for the US government or military or commanding officers in the field to shuffle embedded reporters away from "crime scenes" or whatever you want to call them in anything that I've argued.
Where "them" is the US military apparatus, and not any particular embedded journalist, embedded journalists in general, etc. I doubt that most journalists go out to a warzone thinking "Boy I can't wait to sell this war to the people back home." I do think that there's a pretty well established culture in the military as a whole that filters and spit polishes the news that escapes from it. Not very many people have to be intentionally or maliciously misrepresenting anything in order for it to occur.
Shit, look at the volume of stories about the bullshit that goes on with US military recruiters. A google search will give you a month's reading. The US military is a body devoted to throwing its weight around at home and abroad, and that includes selling itself. Constantly.
And yes, you did - you argued that none of the scandals that have come out of the war have come from embedded journalists, and that this bolsters your idea that the whole thing is sanitized propaganda.
Some of those scandals would be impossible to come from embeds, and others come from units that had no embeds.
For that to be planned - and therefore be part of the process of sensitization and propaganda that you think is the case - the government would be required to be incredible prescient, because they'd have to ensure that no scandalous actions that occur as a result of anything at all(ie, soldiers crushing a family car with a tank, or the collateral murder video) never occurred in the presence of embedded journalists, or that somehow the US government could cover up said incidents that occurred around embeds, despite the US government's habit of leaking like a sieve.
I'm not really making a whole lot of an argument here. It's more of a long winded comment: "I don't trust the US military to reliably report its activities a whole lot more (if any more) than I trust the NSA to behave."
As far as I'm concerned, it's just another head on the beast with little accountability and answering primarily to special interests and not the American people, who have a choice of Republican or Republican-lite when they go vote on machines that don't give them a receipt.
In the run-up to the Iraq War, CNN broadcast detailed diagrams and 3D models of mobile chemical weapons labs being used by Saddam's forces in Iraq that DID NOT EXIST. Of course, Bush and friends had deniability because they were listening to their intelligence agencies and consultants. Oh wait... we've learned that those intelligence agencies are corrupt as shit. Oh noes. On and on.
When the military gives me a reason to trust a single word uttered about them by television or any other mainstream news outlet ever again, I'll reconsider.
I can't argue that I'm not all over the place, but hey, oxy (which incidentally has done fuck-all for the pain from this broken rib but sure has got me feeling doped as hell.)
And just how did you break your rib, anyway? That sounds like an interesting story.
Embeds are basically honorary US soldiers, are you going to deny that? C'mon. Is your best friend an embedded war reporter or something? I wasn't looking to pick particularly on embeds in the first place. I mentioned them almost off hand as an example of a source I have difficulty assigning veracity to, and then admittedly I probably hyperfocused on them after you or Andrew singled it out because, seriously, doped as shit over here.
I'm actually more concerned about the lack of independent journalists on their own recognizance than I am about embeds, but I think the rise of the latter (obviously) precipitated the decline of the former. I feel as though reporting from embeds is not corroborated well (or at all) and can't possibly avoid being influenced by a sense of camaraderie.
Here's an article that makes the more focused embed argument: https://www.stanford.edu/group/sjir/pdf/journalism_real_final_v2.pdf
I confess I have not read all 47 citations.
The story of the rib is a boring one. I have osteoporosis from 3 decades of chronic steroid use due to Crohn's disease. For the past few weeks, I've had an extremely aggressive and forceful cough that my doctor believes may even be pertussis (Whooping Cough). Evidently one or more of my very forceful, racking coughs broke one of my poor, spongy ribs. It hurts like a motherfucker.
I'm going tomorrow for chest x-rays to confirm that's what it is. The pain is all in my upper right chest and almost feels like a muscle pull except FAR more acute and the range of motion of my arm is totally unaffected.
Journalists who go it alone run the very real risk of being captured by hostile forces and ending up dead.
I'm not judging anybody for choosing a safer option when the stakes are literally their lives, but that doesn't mean I can't be skeptical about the quality of the reporting that comes out of it.
Your skepticism of the reporting coming from embedded journalists is misplaced. As has been pointed out previously they are not embedded with units that are in a position to do the things you are seeking to see them report on. It is like you are complaining about the local school reporter because he focuses on who won the local football game and ignores what is going on at the school 100 miles away where there is no school reporter.
Your problem appears to be with the people in charge of embedding reporters.
I already said about four times up above that my issue isn't so much with embedded reporters as with the absence of independent reporting, which is at least in part the case BECAUSE of the perception/pretense/whatever that embedded reporting is adequate.
When someone writes Tennyson - level poetry about it, then you'll know it's an interesting conflict.
Now think about the Vietnam war. Do you think Apocalypse Now is any less of a work of art than the Charge of the Light Brigade? What about The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty, pretty impressive works of art about ongoing current conflicts?
Movies and video games are the most expensive art forms to make, yet also the most accessible to the masses. That was the place of poetry, painting and sculpture in the 19th century. I think the representations of modern conflicts are covered just fine.