One of the most unusual things about the quite unusual war going on in Iraq is the presence of so-called embedded reporters, or "embeds," assigned to British and U.S. ground units, aviation units, ships and headquarters throughout the combat zone. The only difficulty is trying to figure out the significance of this brand-new media phenomenon.
Conventional wisdom has been that the embeds' up-to-the-minute reporting from the various fronts has given us all an impression of the second Persian Gulf War that is unprecedentedly free of bias, filters, framing or any other synonym for partiality you can think of. This war, we have been assured, is coming to us raw. It's live, it's direct from the battlefield; there is nothing between the images and events unfolding before our eyes but space -- not time, and certainly not spin.
If we watch enough of the embeds' reports, the argument goes, we should have as clear an idea as possible of what is actually happening in Iraq. Isn't an eyewitness report worth a hundred stories written after the fact, with time for other people's opinions to get in the way? That has been the assumption. But is it true?