“Those organizations are obligated to tell their readers and their viewers what the restrictions are,” he said. “If you fail to disclose that, you’re really doing everyone a disservice.”
This is not the first time a CNN journalist has been embedded with a foreign military; in 2016, its journalists embedded with Iraqi special forces. This precedent notwithstanding, some have criticized CNN for accepting the IDF’s terms. “This is not journalism,” Jeet Heer, a national affairs correspondent at The Nation and former TNR staff writer, wrote on X. Shailja Patel, a writer and activist, called CNN “officially an IDF propaganda outlet.” And Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and occasional TNR contributor, wrote, “In other words, CNN has agreed NOT to be an INDEPENDENT news outlet.”
Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, noted in an interview that “the original purpose of embedding was to control journalists.” She and Christenson both referenced Phillip Knightley’s 1975 classic book The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam, which describes how the government invented embedded journalism in response to critical coverage of the Vietnam War. In a chapter added in 2004, Knightley wrote that as civilian casualties in Afghanistan passed 5,000, “the Pentagon sought a media strategy that would turn attention back to the military’s role in the war, especially the part played by ordinary American service men and women. This would require getting war correspondents ‘on side.’”