In the wars of the 1980s and '90s, military planners placed considerable emphasis on controlling the information that reached the American public. Journalists were excluded from the wars in Grenada and Panama until the fighting was already concluded. This in turn led to complaints from journalists, and in the 1990 war in Iraq, code-named Operation Desert Storm, the Pentagon adopted a "pool system" through which a handpicked group of reporters was allowed to travel with soldiers under tightly controlled conditions. Between August 1990 and January 1991 only the "combat pools"—about 23 groups of reporters —were allowed access to military units [...]
May
01
2003
When Journalists Attack
The Boston Herald's loose cannon
Boston Herald correspondent Jules Crittenden, who covered the Iraq War as an embedded journalist, is a writer whose blunt prose deals in absolutes: good vs. evil, life and death. But there's one dichotomy that Crittenden doesn't draw so clearly: reporter vs. participant. Frequently drawing comparisons between "embeds" such as himself and the troops with whom they travel, Crittenden seemed to have crossed the line and effectively became a combatant in the war he was assigned to cover. In a column Crittenden wrote for the Poynter Institute (Poynter Online, 4/11/03), he admitted that while the unit he was following was on [...]
