Author: Lauren Quinterno
Graduation Year: 2005
Advisor: Diana Owen
Reader: Stephen Farnsworth
Date: 02 March 2007
Link to Thesis: LaurenQuinterno.pdf
The 2003 Iraq war was the first conflict concurrent with a large-scale government program that “embedded” media with the military, affording journalists an unprecedented view of the battlefield. Despite the promise that the journalists would capture the war in all its vagaries, there is virtually no consensus among media scholars and critics as to how adequately the war was covered, especially with regard to the motivation behind the program and the effectiveness of embedded journalists. Coverage by embeds has been faulted for the tone it adopted and for deficiencies in its content. While some assert that the program yielded coverage that was propagandistic and sanitized, others maintain that coverage was frightfully negative and inaccurate. This study aims to contextualize these arguments in two ways. First, interviews with members of the media and the military will account for the voices of those who were intimately involved in the program, yet underrepresented in literature regarding the coverage. The interviews will provide a more complete picture of the relationship between soldiers and embedded journalists during the war while providing counterpoint to the arguments held by remote observers.
Second, a content analysis of news coverage aims to determine the extent to which news frames employed in segments by embedded journalists have led to the competing claims as to how the war was reported. Because news frames, which imply deficiencies, enable journalists to simplify complex issues like war, the research has modified the four “information biases” as defined by W. Lance Bennett in News, the Politics of Illusion. The methodology allows inferences to be made as to how the content, context, and closure of news segments may have led to the conflicting perceptions of the coverage.