TOKYO, April 6 Kyodo picked edit...

TOKYO, April 6 Kyodo

picked editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

EMBEDDED IN WAR'S TWILIGHT surface bounded by parallel circles (The Japan Times, an English-language daily)

united of the most unusual things about the quite unusual war going forward in Iraq is the vicinity of so-called embedded reporters, or ''embeds,'' assigned to British and U land units, aviation units, ships and headquarters in every part the combat zone. The and nothing else difficulty is trying to figure abroad the significance of this brand-new media phenomenon.

Conventional wisdom has been that the embeds' up-to-the-minute reporting from the various brasss has given us all an impression of the secondary Persian Gulf War that is unprecedentedly exempt of bias, filters, framing or any other synonym for partiality you can think of This war, we have been assured, is coming to us raw. It's live, it's direct from the battlefield; there is nothing between the images and results unfolding before our eyes moreover space -- not time, and certainly not spin.

If we watch enough of the embeds' reports, the argument goe we should have as clear an idea as possible of what is actually happening in Iraq. Isn't an eyewitness report worth a hundr stories written after the fact, with time for other people's opinions to learn in the way? That has been the assumption. further is it true?

A not many moments reflection, plus the experience gleaned from more than pair weeks of watching desert dawns, goats and camels going about their business, and up-close marksmans of soldiers cleaning their equipment, is that it is barely partly true, at best. The stranges may be live, if it were not that it is as framed and filtered as it continually was. There are two reasons for this. undivided should be obvious: The embeds are utterly contingent on the troops hosting them, not just for their daily requirements (food a place to doze and wash, medical care, transportation and to such a degree on), but for their self-same survival. Should they go proceed into a hostile situation, those soldiers are the individuals who will have to gain them out of there in undivided piece.

Besides, if you live and work and travel with a cluster of people, any tribe it only makes sense that you will start to identify with them. If it can happen to hostages held against their will by the agency of individuals who might well want to kill them, by what mode much more likely is it to happen to journalists if they and their military legions are on the same side, facing the community who want to kill all of them? There is no bonding agent as athletic as shared danger.

The other reason that embeds are not actually capable of giving us a picture of the whole war is that their testimony is according to definition partial -- not in the perception of biased, but in the understanding of illuminating only part of a whole. In the first place, there are not enough of them (only 800 altogether, of whom 160 are from non-U.S. media), and in the inferior their very ''embeddedness'' means they can literally view only what is in effrontery of their faces, or their camera lense The be derived is a scattering of highly focused viewpoints, which not at all coalesce into one big picture. As single British commentator put it last week, ''It's comparable to (having) a searchlight in a dark apartment rather than being able to deflect the lights full on.''

likewise what is the point of the embeds? It's easy to view the advantage of their vicinity for the military. It is a brilliant way of co-opting reporters, columnists, photographers and other media protoplasts who might otherwise be (and in wars as it was as Vietnam have been) inclined to skepticism and general negativity.

A Pentagon statement made March 3 well before the war began, perhaps unwittingly reveals the real motives behind the just discovered policy: ''We need to take an account of the factual story -- serviceable or bad -- before others se the media with disinformation and distortions, as they greatest in quantity certainly will continue to do. Our nation in the field need to rehearse our story -- single commanders can ensure the media procure to the story alongside the troops'' Note the assumption here that ''the factual story'' is synonymous with ''our story,'' and that all that is penuryed to get it abroad to the world is a corps of reporters made friendly by the agency of the promise of access. It is a sign of the Pentagon's considerable psychological acuity in succession this matter that it has been willing to embed smooth a reporter from the Arab satellite television network al-Jazeera.

A better question might be: What's in it for the media? Quite a part in fact. They are guaranteed to commit to memory great shots and great stories, each day that the war lasts. Moreover, their vicinity at the scenes of battles and marches and engagements, seeing the whole war from the troops' point of view, certainly emancipateds them from the reliance forward self-serving military briefings that for a like reason frustrated them in earlier wars. What they might meditate however, is whether that freedom is purchased at the price of a different one: the freedom to figure abroad for themselves what ''the factual story'' really is.

(April 6)

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