Originally posted by Lizking
What is your point?
What's yours?
Mine is that anyone who relies on the Marines to show them the war necessarily gets a slanted view: to be balanced he'd have to spend equal time embedded with the insurgents, with all their bias.
But embedding's worse and more insipid than that simple imbalance to keep being embedded with the USMC, he has to live up to the other meaning of embed and keep being in bed with them.
So for example: the whole "The enemy has a face he is called Satan and he is in Fallujah" thing is an outstandingly embarrassing comment a huge faux pas in the "hearts and minds" battle as it adds credence to the insurgent and Al Qaeda view that this really is a crusade: Xianity vs Islam. Any reporter worth his salt would have that poor Colonel's balls mounted on a plaque in their study for that foot-in-the-mouth effort. Does Paul Wood go for it? No. It's presented deadpan with no comment. Why? I can only presume it's because he doesn't want to lose his embed and probably by extension his job.
Embedding leads to exciting action pictures but very one-sided (and therefore IMO lousy) reporting. That's the main reason why the military do it. Even the Indonesian military used it when they went into Aceh.
