MoD media chief defend 'embeds'

Living with the troops put reporters in the line of fire

Reporters "embedded" with army units in Iraq provided coverage which the public would not otherwise have seen, UK defence media chiefs have said.

Questioned by MPs on Wednesday, the Ministry of Defence officials also said hundreds of thousands of pounds had been spent handling the media in Iraq.

Ahead of the hearing, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson said "embedding" compromised journalists' independence.

The MoD officials said the "embeds"' reports suffered a lack of context.

Blind context?

Journalists, including some who worked alongside military units as "embeds" during the war, have already given evidence to the Commons defence committee's inquiry.

Tony Pawson, the MoD's director general said: "The coverage which was given by the embeds could not have been obtained in any other way and it did add significantly and valuably to the overall picture we were seeing."

He accepted that some journalists were not very experienced under fire but were given advice by the military on the seriousness of an incident.

I didn't want to be part of it because I didn't want to be dependent on the people I was reporting on for my security, my food, my transport The BBC's John Simpson on "embedding"

Conservative MP James Cran said he had been constantly irritated by "embeds" who offered either no context or "blind comment".

But Colonel Paul Brook, MoD assistant director of media operations policy, said the coalition had gone into the process with its "eyes open".

They had been content with "quite a lot" of the coverage because it was factual, accurate and based on what was happening in a particular area, he said.

Context concerns

Mr Pawson said the "embeds" did not necessarily provide for a "sophisticated audience" but studies of the war had shown public satisfaction with embeds.

There would be discussions with editors and broadcasters about how to help give more context to reports.

Part of the issue was that broadcasters had anchored their programmes in London, rather than the Gulf, more than expected.

CentCom briefings were different from expected

Earlier, Mr Simpson, one of those journalists who covered the war without being "embedded" said he had felt working from within a military unit would have compromised his journalism.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today: "I didn't want to be part of it because I didn't want to be dependent on the people I was reporting on for my security, my food, my transport.

"We need to have independent journalists moving around."

'Walk over' motives?

Mr Simpson said the embedding of journalists was allowed in Iraq because the US and UK military had felt the war would be "a walk over".

He said he believed the system would not be repeated in a conflict where the US felt its forces would face tougher opposition.

A report commissioned by the BBC has found that reporters embedded with military units in Iraq gave a sanitised picture of events.

Closeness to the units did not make reporters less objective, the study by the Cardiff School of Journalism said earlier this month.

Censorship?

Some journalists have told the committee there were some cases of inappropriate censorship but these were mostly down to inexperience from media handlers.

Mr Pawson said constraints on safety or fears that operations could be given away could not be described as censorship.

But he accepted training needed to be more systematic for media handlers in future conflicts.

He put the cost of media handling for the war at "hundreds of thousands of pounds".

That included sending 180 media handlers out to Iraq.

Overall, journalists had behaved "responsibly", with only two or three embedded reporters out of 150 causing problems on issues like operational security, he said.

CentCom workings

Mr Pawson insisted that the focus of media operations had been providing accurate information to the public, rather than managing perceptions of the war.

And he said the MoD had decided to give more briefings and interviews in London when it emerged that American officials were giving context about the war in Washington rather than at Central Command in Qatar.

The US officials had also offered information, such as weapons systems videos, more geared to the American media than UK outlets, he said.

He added that the media had probably wanted Central Command to be headed by a "Stormin" Norman Schwarzkopf type figure as in the first Gulf War.

Instead, General Tommy Franks was a "very different character".