Posted April 24, 2003

By Greg Licamele

Veteran ABC News reporter Ted Koppel admitted he was skeptical about the embedded journalist program outlined by the Pentagon before the start of the war in Iraq.

However, after five weeks with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Mechanized Division, Koppel changed his mind when he realized the access he was afforded.

“It astonished me as I began to test the limits of what embedding meant and what access meant,” Koppel told a standing-room-only audience of 500 people at the National Press Club and those watching and listening live on CSPAN and WMAL-AM on the April 21st “Kalb Report.” “Access was total. I could sit in on any briefing they had.”

During the first weeks of the war, Koppel was not on the front lines, but rather in the rear with the commanders, so his access with war planners was constant. He’d often ask the commander of the division, Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, what the military plans were and Blount would simply tell Koppel the details.

“That’s a remarkable trust a military man would have in a reporter,” said moderator Marvin Kalb.

Koppel noted, though, that he signed an agreement, along with 600 other embedded journalists, that they would not jeopardize an ongoing military operation. He agreed the trust was remarkable, something unheard of since the Vietnam War, but that the detailed plans were “tremendously inhibiting.”

“Nothing is more difficult for a reporter than for a general to say, ‘Here’s the plan. Now don’t give anything away to the enemy that could be damaging.’”

Koppel and his crew of one producer, one engineer and two camera people traveled in two unarmored vehicles — a civilian Humvee and a landrover. Because they were embedded with a mechanized division, the crew did not have to walk, unlike many of their colleagues elsewhere in Iraq. Koppel had one of his preconceived notions about the division dispelled as it moved north toward Baghdad.

“I had this image of the 3rd Infantry Division with 20,000 men and women sort of in one lump,” Koppel said. “They were spread out over tens, if not hundreds of square miles.”

This large swath of land, soldiers and equipment also required a great amount of coordination, especially with the Air Force, that was “mindboggling” to Koppel.

“When an Iraqi artillery piece fired a shell, the position of that artillery piece would be fixed by American radar almost instantaneously,” Koppel reported. “They would have the grid and they would pass the grid on to the planes that were already circling overhead. They would pass it on to the American artillery and rocket launchers, and within three-and-a-half to five minutes, that artillery piece would be bombed. I don’t think the Iraqis, up until the very end, understood how quickly, how smoothly and how efficiently that worked.”

Amid the bombs blasting and the guns roaring, Koppel began to understand that the concept of war has changed for American soldiers and for the American people.

For soldiers, he thinks they rarely have an opportunity to see the enemy face-to-face.

“With the laptop computers that all these guys carry with them, where everything is an icon, it takes on some of the attributes of a game,” Koppel said. “When you are looking at a computer screen and when the enemy and the icon — a half dozen humans — is destroyed, then (you lose the) sense that you have actually taken some human lives.”

Koppel agreed with a question from an audience member that war now has an entertainment value, adding that viewers watch war from a distance with guns and missiles being fired but without watching the ultimate consequences. He said many of the armored vehicles fire at targets 30-80 miles away, so the soldiers are not fully exposed to the horrors of war, either.

“In order to understand the gravity of war, that at the very least what you do for the American public is you say people die, people get injured,” Koppel said. “Do you show the faces of the dead? No, but do you show a body lying there? I think you do. People have to understand that war is a dreadful thing.” Koppel’s words were supported by what he and his producers decided to show on “Nightline.”

“We showed pictures deliberately,” he said. “The very least you can do for a dead soldier of either side is acknowledge the fact that he died in combat, that this is a human being that died.”

During the war, Koppel often would broadcast live from the battlefield, but that’s not his preferred way to report the news.

“If you simply point a live camera at an event and beam it back to the United States, that’s not journalism,” he said. “Journalism requires sifting and putting things into some kind of a context.”

Though he is no longer skeptical of the embedding idea, Koppel’s mind has not changed about the entire government.

“I was enormously impressed by the soldiers,” Koppel said. “But have I lost my cynicism for government? Hell, no. My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remains just as well developed as they were before I went.”

“The Kalb Report,” which is underwritten by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is co-sponsored by The George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, The Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the National Press Club. The partnership has produced 34 programs in the “The Kalb Report” series since 1994. Forums have covered issues at the intersection of public policy and the press, including ethics in journalism, talk show democracy and covering the private lives of public officials.

©2003 The George Washington University Office of University Relations, Washington, D.C.
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