During the war, in which several of our embedded correspondents were able to report from moving vehicles crossing the Iraqi desert, the use of technology made news gathering safer.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Once Iraq became a hot bed for kidnapping, reporters had to use every kind of trick they could manage to avoid it. This included chase cars, security men for more prosperous agencies and networks, and GPS signals on satellite phones that could pinpoint the journalist's locations.
In Iraq, embedding allows us to put reporters in situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for them.
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
In my first company, Seer Technologies, where I was chief technology officer, we shied away from the media. We watched every word and were guarded in front of journalists.
Our embedded reporters during the war agreed to guidelines established by the military.
In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.
Today we all are enjoying the fruits of the digital era. Millions of sources of information coming at us at lightning fast speed. That technology has also democratized the gathering and dissemination of news, allowing for 'citizen journalists' to make their mark, even usurping the role of mainstream news organizations at times.
We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.
The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms.
We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat.
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