Michael Yon coined the term “micro-embed” to describe media members who do short duration embeds during his interview with Professor and Dr. Instapundit last week. It struck me as a provocative term, so when I interviewed Michael over the weekend I asked him about it. (You can listen to the interview Kevin Whelan of Pundit Review Radio and I had with Michael at Kevin’s site here.)
Not surprisingly, Michael used “micro-embed” as a pejorative, although he went to great lengths to be nice about it. As virtually everyone who reads blogs knows, Michael Yon has spent a great deal of time in Iraq outside the Green Zone. He has risked his life to report on the Iraq war. He also plans to spend all of 2007 “in country” as well, unless, as he mordantly commented, he gets killed.
Before reporting on Iraq and becoming a long-term embed, Michael had become an expert on military matters by experiencing them first hand. Michael is Special Forces, so he brings to any embed experience a base level of understanding that few other members of the media possess.
Now compare Michael Yon’s reportage to the typical embed. The typical embed stays for days, not months or years. As Michael commented, even for someone with his experience it’s impossible to tell what’s going on in the first couple of weeks. Even Michael finds his head spinning for the first several days on an embed.
Michael was careful not to belittle the reporters who get themselves embedded. Even if they’re only embeds for a short period of time, they are taking a considerable risk in the process. Also, they can do some valuable reporting. If a paper sends a reporter to embed himself with a local National Guard troop for a week, the reporter can walk away with some valuable knowledge and a great story about the local soldiers and how they’re doing.
But there’s also an ugly side to micro-embedding. A reporter who gets embedded establishes a form of credibility. His pronouncements are then given a considerable amount of weight. While the reporter is to be lauded for going through the embedding process, it’s important to know what he has seen and what he hasn’t.
To use a hackneyed metaphor (because it’s the same one I used on the air on Saturday), the reporter has seen a few trees but he hasn’t seen the forest. And yet how often have we seen reporters return from an embed and make sweeping pronouncements? How often have we heard a reporter fresh from a week in country come back with conclusive evidence that the Sunni and Shiites will never get along? Or that we’ve irrevocably blown it?
To be fair, this phenomenon cuts both ways. Reporters in search of a different sort of narrative can find evidence that morale is high. This kind of reporting, while more appealing to me and probably to you, still relies on the same sort of flawed process: Finding a dollop of evidence and then extrapolating it across an entire country.
THE MICRO-EMBED TOO OFTEN SERVES as a handy device for media members to confirm their pre-existing notions and then bludgeon their audience with their new-found “evidence.” The situation is frighteningly analogous to a politician’s photo-op filled journey to Iraq. Has a single politician ever come back from Iraq with his or her mind changed about anything? The typical political trip to Iraq serves as a mere credential-buffing exercise, and isn’t anything that should be confused with an honest pursuit of knowledge.
The same often (though not always) holds true for the media and its reporters. That’s good to know. And it’s certainly news we can use.
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