We're Not Seeing the Whole Picture
Imagine, if you will, watching an entire NFL football game through a tiny camera embedded in the helmet of one offensive lineman on one of the two teams. You'd see only part of each play when that team's offense is on the field. And from that ground-level, up-close look you'd be hard-pressed to see the overall play developing. And when the lineman was out for a play, or the team's defense was on the field, you'd see nothing much going on at all and might conclude, wrongly, that the game was over.

The "embedded journalists" program is kind of like that. While it is providing Americans with a view of the Iraq war that is unprecedented in the history of warfare ... the view is unfulfilling, incomplete and often misleading. Why? Thanks to the embedded journalists, we are seeing tiny slices of the war, not the whole war, as Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld so aptly put it. But why is it that way - there are, after all, more than 700 "embedded" journalists reporting live from the hundreds of military units spread across Iraq and Kuwait.

Ah, but each is reporting for a different news service - some for the networks, some for local teevee news programs, some for big newspapers like the New York Times, and some for small newspapers like the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle. You'd have to watch all of the news shows - from all the networks and all the local news programs across the nation - and read all of the newspapers from across the country, just to see all of the coverage. And even then you'd be getting only unconnected slices. And you'd be getting no reports from within the Iraqi military - Saddam didn't embed reporters among the Republican Guard. There's no counterpart to NBC's David Bloom reporting live as the Fedayeen terrorists prepare car-bomb attacks, use Iraqi women and children as human shields, shell innocents trying to flee Basra, or fake surrender only to gun down allied soldiers from behind their white flags.

Our side fights honorably, and allows reporters in. The other side does neither.