THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I don’t know that any baseball journalists are “embedded” in the strictest sense, simply credentialed media. (The last embedded baseball journalist was probably Bissinger in Three Nights In August.) I suppose you could put in a disclaimer for that, but you might as well stick it in the masthead, because all journalists are credentialed. Doesn’t seem to make the White House press corps any less adversarial.

Stepping back and addressing the larger point for a moment - during the Iraq War, at least, where “embedding” journalists was in essence created, or at least named that, there was exceedingly little prior restraint on coverage. (I’m not saying there was none - during the initial invasion, there were a handful of journalists - Peter Baker of the Washington Post is the one I remember off the top of my head - embedded with the I MEF command element, and they were granted full access to classified areas, agreeing to prior review in the process. I don’t recall any changes being made to their articles, however.)

Embedded journalists did, on the whole, seem to provide more “positive” coverage of US forces. But they weren’t made to, and one US News and World Report piece sticks out in my mind for being heavily critical of Marine units. The reporter remained embedded. (Reporters were disembedded only for violating security proceedures, largely revealing troop locations.)

What the research literature shows is that embedded journalists most likely provided more positive coverage due to their limited viewpoint of the overall conflict and their shared experience with the units they were embedded with. (Oh, and the fact that “your” unit was shooting at the people shooting at you.)