Modern armies move fast, over long distances, often far from any town with a telegraph office or a satellite uplink. Reporters who want to see the fighting need transport, food, communications and permission, and in a war zone the military often controls much of that. From the 1980s onwards the United States tried several ways of organising that access. This guide follows two of them, the press pool and the embedding system, through a 1996 study published by the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute and a 2003 content analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, published on the Pew Research Center's website.
The access problem
The Strategic Studies Institute study, The Troubled Path to the Pentagon's Rules on Media Access to the Battlefield: Grenada to Today, was written by Pascale Combelles-Siegel and published in May 1996. Its starting point is Operation Urgent Fury, the US operation in Grenada in 1983. Since Grenada, the study says, the question of media access to the battlefield had regularly caused controversy between the press and the military, with journalists and editors complaining about military control over information.
The study frames the problem as a relationship with two sides, each with real interests, and describes the efforts of both communities to find a workable arrangement. That framing is useful because it avoids a simple story of a free press against a secretive military, or of a responsible military against a reckless press. Both sides had reasons for what they wanted.
The Department of Defense pool
After each major operation, according to the study, the Pentagon reviewed its relations with the media and tried to institutionalise, and then improve, a system for granting access to the battlefield: the Department of Defense National Media Pool. As the word is generally used, a pool is a small group of journalists given access on behalf of the wider press, whose reports are shared with other outlets.
The study records that the arrangement did not satisfy the media, for two reasons. First, journalists saw the pool as a convenient way to limit, rather than to grant, access to the battlefield. Second, the pool proved cumbersome in terms of logistics and limited journalists' ability to react to events as they happened.
The 1991 Gulf War
In the study's account, those drawbacks were particularly evident in the Gulf War. US Central Command used the pool system to manage the large number of journalists who arrived, but did not provide enough logistical support to make sure pool reports were transmitted in good time. A pool report that arrives after the news has moved on serves neither the reporters nor their readers.
The war's aftermath brought something new. For the first time, the study says, the media as an institution demanded to be part of the review process. Beginning in September 1991, a group of five media representatives met the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Pete Williams, to work out new common ground rules for covering combat operations.
The 1992 guidelines
After eight months of negotiation, in May 1992, the Pentagon announced what the study calls the first agreement on war coverage guidelines. The agreement became a Department of Defense regulation and the basis for the first Joint Doctrine for Public Affairs. The study reports that both the military and the media greeted the 1992 rules as the start of a new era in their relationship.
It identifies two main achievements:
- No exclusive pools as standard. The rules abolished exclusive pool coverage as the normal means of granting access.
- Security at the source. They replaced the review of reports for security after they were written with security at the source.
The study also lists questions the rules left open: limits on the number of reporters assigned to an operation, live coverage of battlefield operations, access for media from other countries to US operations, and media access to multinational operations. It warned that failing to address these could undo the progress the agreement had made.
Embedding in 2003
When the war in Iraq began in March 2003, the US approach had changed again. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, then affiliated with Columbia University and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, described the most noted feature of the coverage as a new system of embedding some 600 journalists with American and British troops. The ICRC describes embedded journalists as those who report from within or alongside military units.
To give some framework for the public argument about embedding, the Project analysed embedded reports on television on three of the first six days of the war: 21, 22 and 24 March 2003. It looked at the main morning news hours and the evening news on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News. In 40.5 hours of programming, the five networks aired 108 embedded reports, and each was coded for topic, editing, sourcing and the nature of the footage.
What the coverage looked like
The Project's main findings, as it reported them:
| Measure | Finding |
|---|---|
| Primarily factual rather than interpretive | 94% of stories |
| Live and unedited | 6 in 10 reports |
| Only the reporter heard from | 77% of stories (83% on the broadcast networks, 71% on cable) |
| Described military action or its results | 47% of reports |
| Showed people being hit by weapons fire | None of the stories examined |
The Project summed up the coverage as largely anecdotal: exciting and dull, focused on combat, mostly live and unedited, often short of context but usually rich in detail. It said the coverage had all the virtues and vices of reporting only what you can see. Its analysts also noted that the rush to get information on air live sometimes caused confusion and errors, as partial accounts became distorted in the retelling.
On balance, the Project judged that Americans seemed better served by the embedding system than by the more limited press pools of the 1991 Gulf War or the halting access to events in Afghanistan. It added that early fears that embedding would simply co-opt the press, or would put military security at serious risk, might fade over time. That was a judgement made after the first week of a war, and the Project presented it as such.
Public opinion was divided. The Project cited a Pew Research Center survey in which 58% of Americans said embedded reporters were a good thing. Of the 34% who said they were a bad thing, most were worried that the reporting gave out information that could help the enemy.
Embedded journalists and the law
"Embedded journalist" is a practical term, not a legal one. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) explains that it is not a term used in international humanitarian law and is not formally defined. The legal category is the war correspondent: a journalist formally authorised by the armed forces to accompany them. Some embedded journalists fall into that category if they have that authorisation, and if captured they would then be entitled to prisoner-of-war status.
The ICRC also points to the practical risks of reporting from inside a unit. Wearing protective equipment such as a helmet or body armour does not affect a journalist's civilian status. But journalists who work close to armed forces in zones of active combat, especially if they wear clothing that looks like a military uniform, are at greater risk of being caught up in hostilities, and such clothing makes it harder for armed forces to tell civilians from combatants. The law page covers these rules in more detail.
Next: War photography: what the camera could and could not show