Quotes of the Day

The fog of war may be a cliché, but in the first week of this one we all lived in a sandstorm. You're watching ITV Tuesday, and there's Juliet Bremner saying that 40 or 50 people standing on a street corner in Basra constitute a major uprising against Saddam. The next day, a British officer dismisses this, saying the scene was more like "a Saturday night in Newcastle." One minute, CNN's Walter Rodgers is reporting that a convoy of up to 1,000 Iraqi vehicles is steaming south from Baghdad to retake a strategic bridge; within hours the Pentagon is saying it's just not true. The BBC heralded the fall of Umm Qasr nine times. You can't just watch this war — you've got to edit it for yourself.

A main cause of the confusion is the way 24-hour news meshes with the Pentagon's news-management strategy, in which about 600 U.S. and 100 British and other international journalists are "embedded" with military units for the duration of the war. Embedded journalists by definition are unable to put what they see into the context of the war as a whole. The awful truth is: No one knows the totality of what is going on; not the reporters in the field, not the producers, not even the generals, who after all couldn't agree within a margin of 100,000 how many troops would be required for the ground campaign.

Some critics blame the messenger — the embedded journalists. The rap is simple: embeds become too cozy with their units and are prone to outright manipulation. "The embeds' reports translate into victories for the U.S. military in their concerted propaganda campaign against Iraq, its allies and its sympathizers," Jack Shafer charged last week in Slate. And many of the early embed reports, especially on television, have been sympathetic toward the coalition. Certainly eyebrows were raised when prominent nbc reporter Brian Williams said that the troops he spent time with "are incredibly trained and motivated, and we are grateful to them."

But let's not unmake the embeds too soon. Covering a ground war is dangerous. The "unilateral" reporters, those not traveling with U.S. military units, are putting their lives on the line, as the death last week of ITN reporter Terry Lloyd showed. Even a self-censoring journalist is better than a dead one, and there's no question that the embeds are safer.

And embedded journalists are vastly preferable to the "pool" system used during the 1991 Gulf War. Back then, a rotating group of journalists went out every day to the place where the Pentagon told them. That was it; everybody else stayed behind. And is there really any evidence that embedded reporters won't transmit news that's damaging to the coalition's interests? Granted, most Western reporters are hardly sympathetic to Iraq, but when the U.S. advance bogged down last week, the embeds reported it with gusto. Most want to get a good story, and as long as it isn't censored by the military (censorship or time-delay has been a staple of coverage of every modern war) they're going to put it out there. When 14 Iraqis died in an apparently accidental attack on a Baghdad market, nothing about reporters' being embedded kept the gruesome images off our screens.

Embedding creates multiple sources of news, each serving up a little slice of grunt-level reality. Last week, grenades were thrown into officers' tents in a camp set up by the 101st Airborne Division in northern Kuwait; initial suspicion pointed toward terrorist infiltration. Time and Sky News happened to have reporters embedded in the next tent, and within hours they'd reported that the arrested suspect was a U.S. soldier. Had this horrible event happened in the first Gulf War, it's possible the military could have kept that embarrassing detail secret, since pool reporters might not have been told.

These are the great strengths of embedded reporting — personal views of events as they happen and access to stories that the combatants might prefer us not to see. But no single slice of the war can give you the big picture; that's why passive viewing is not a good idea for this war. In the days before 24-hour news, wire services would send out early news flashes that would prove wrong, and follow up with corrections. No one saw them except editors who made decisions about when things felt true enough to transmit. That duty now falls to the viewer. Switch between multiple news channels; don't believe anything until a credible source verifies it, if then; look at the blogger sites and, yes, print media; follow up on anything you think is important, because the facts are bound to change. And remember, it's only been a few days' fighting. Even if the war gets worse, the reporting might yet get better.

• JIM LEDBETTER
• Don't blame the messengers for coverage of the war, says Jim Ledbetter