Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or so the saying goes, but it is not the only thing. Truth, freedom and love, if not the perception of reality, are all subject to interpretation.
Interpretation could prove to be one of the most important weapons of the recent U.S. war against Iraq, as U.S. administration officials fought dissenting public opinion and the practiced propaganda machine of Saddam Hussein. Department of Defense officials decided to allow journalists to be embedded inside military units as they attempted to remove Hussein’s regime to document the experience and show the United States and the world the necessity of the war effort.
Bryan Whitman, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, said in a release at the onset of the war that the embedded journalists would cover the war, for better or worse.
“They’ll see the goodness with which our troops carry out their missions. Our troops are human, though, too, and they’ll make mistakes, and I believe that reporters will cover the bad as it occurs. And I think reporters will also cover the ugly because war is ugly, and the world should see that war is ugly and we don’t make these decisions to go to war lightly,” Whitman said.
Nahal Toosi, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who was embedded for two months of war, answered questions from readers in an Internet chat about her experiences of reporting in the U.S. war against Iraq.
Toosi said U.S. officials did not censor the stories she submitted via e-mail to her editors.
“For the first 96 hours of the war’s launch, the head guy in charge of the media in my unit looked through our stories to ensure we weren’t giving away exact locations that could compromise operational security,” Toosi said. “But he only asked me to change one phrase that whole time, and it related to location. After that, they weren’t allowed to see the stories, though embedded reporters did have to continue adhering to established ground rules.”
Toosi said perception and an interpretation of the news was an important part of this particular military conflict as Iraqis were especially skeptical of U.S. promises after being lied to and oppressed by Hussein’s regime for so long. Toosi said lack of updated news was the most frustrating aspect of the experience for the soldiers she was embedded with.
“They often relied on rumors and vague briefings from superiors,” Toosi said. “Some had short-wave radios, which helped. Overall, though, it was like living in a news vacuum.”
Toosi said she did her best to keep an unbiased relationship with the troops in her unit, although some human concern for each other was inevitable.
“The relationship was strictly professional, though I think the Marines definitely kept check on me as they would a little sister who has no idea what she’s in for,” Toosi said.
In a weblog she kept throughout her experience as an embedded reporter, Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalist M.L. Lyke commented on the importance of interpretation during war.
“We can see the war protesters on CNN. But no one’s chaining themselves to the bulkheads on the [U.S.S. Abraham] Lincoln. Perspective, perspective,” Lyke wrote.
