Media theory and Danny Schechter's embedded Iraq war critique

Embedded: The Relationship Between Form and Theoretical Assumption in an Account of the Iraq War

Danny Schechter's book Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception looks at the media coverage surrounding the Iraq war and attempts to argue that the American news media failed in its duty to robustly investigate the claims made by the military and civilian government. However, the book's format, coupled with Schechter's theoretical ignorance and uncritical perspective, works to undermine any of his admittedly important concerns, and considering Embedded alongside important texts in communication and media theory allows one to understand how Schechter's assumptions regarding the purpose and functioning of the American news media keep Embedded from performing the critical work it sets out to do. This is not suggest that Schechter's goal is not worthwhile, or that he has wasted his energy, but rather that the text could have had a much more profound impact with certain minor changes and more robust inclusion of communication theory. Thus, any critiques of the book presented here ultimately serve to actually reinforce the text's central argument towards a more critical reception of all media.

Table of Contents

p. 4

A problem of form undermining function -- p. 5

Dedication to an original text -- p. 5

Context is key -- p. 7

Writing in a vacuum -- p. 8

Communication and Media in Embedded -- p. 11

Schechter's misunderstanding via McQuail's miscategorization -- p. 11

Television as the lying eye -- p. 16

Embedded's relation to earlier media and communication theory -- p. 19

Schechter's Open Diary -- p. 19

Schechter's Societal Approach to Media -- p. 20

Conclusion and further questions -- p. 21

Bibliography -- p. 22

Introduction

Danny Schechter's book Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception looks at the media coverage surrounding the Iraq war and attempts to argue that the American news media failed in its duty to robustly investigate the claims made by the military and civilian government. However, it only manages to attempt this, because a number of factors combine in order to preclude the book from offering any useful analysis of the propaganda which made the war possible. In particular, the book's format, coupled with Schechter's theoretical ignorance and uncritical perspective, works to undermine any of his admittedly important concerns, and thus he is ultimately unable to investigate his subject in any real detail. This is not suggest that Schechter's goal is not worthwhile, or that he has wasted his energy, but rather that the text could have had a much more profound impact with certain minor changes and more robust inclusion of communication theory. Considering Embedded alongside important texts in communication and media theory demonstrates the roots of Schechter's problems, and allows one to understand how Schechter's assumptions regarding the purpose and functioning of the American news media keep Embedded from performing the critical work it sets out to do.

A problem of form undermining function

Dedication to an original text

Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception was written by Danny Schechter, a prolific television producer and media critic whose professional career includes stints at ABC News and CNN, although his postgraduate education was completed at the London School of Economics. In many ways Embedded represents the natural product of Schechter's history of media criticism, as his other books and many of the television documentaries he produced deal with questions of mass media and the way in which media narratives are formed and subsequently influence politics and culture. This background informs the entirety of Schechter's book, because he approaches his topic with an almost bipolar perspective regarding journalism; at once he manages to claim the position of a (relatively) objective outsider while simultaneously relying on his history in American journalism as a means of establishing his credibility.

This does not necessarily invalidate Schechter's claims, but it does force the critical reader to deal with certain tendencies on his part, such as the unnecessarily "cute" claim that Schechter "was 'self-embedded' in [his] small office in New York's Times Square" while blogging about the mainstream news coverage of the Iraq war (Schechter, 2003, p. 24). Schechter has claimed to provide "the outside view of a media insider," suggesting that his time in the industry allows him to "see how inadequate is the 'first draft of history,' as daily journalism is called," without bothering to discuss how he may have actually contributed to that inadequacy at any time in his previous career (p. 24). This is only a problem because Schechter repeatedly invokes his previous career in broadcast journalism, and as such one expects to be provided with a somewhat more robust account of this time period.

That Schechter is reluctant to view his own work with the same critical eye that he applied to his object of study is further evidenced by the fact that the book is essentially a collection of reformatted blog posts, complete with typos and the occasional minor factual error. This should not be taken to mean that any book born out of a blog is somehow lacking, but rather that in the specific case of Embedded, the transition from blog to book is not as seamless as it could have been.

Schechter is conscientious enough to note that he is "sure [his] work is flawed with unintended errors, some of [his] making, and some in the reports [he] quoted," but that he did not bother to correct these errors because "covering war is often as chaotic as war itself," and he further "decided against rewriting everything for this book because [he believed] there is value in putting all of this material written at the time in one place" (Schechter, 2003, p. 25-26). Of course, this is a somewhat circular explanation, because all of this material was already in one place: his blog. Thus, even before one is able to consider the more fundamental critical and theoretical contributions Schechter's work might make to the study of mass media and communication, the reader is inevitably forced to accept the possibility that Schechter is more interested in advocating opposition to the Iraq war (a point that is admittedly not without merit) through condemnation of the communicatory process which facilitated that war than in presenting a detailed argument regarding the intricacies of that process.

As mentioned previously, these criticisms do not obviate the value of Schechter's contribution to the study of mass media and communication, but they do reveal how necessary it is for any critical work, and especially one critical of media and modes of communication, to live up to the same standards others are condemned for failing to meet. However, Schechter's book seems to escaped serious criticism on this point, because the apparent novelty of reading a media "insider" decry his former colleagues seems to have overshadowed reviewers' ability to examine the book for its argumentative and formal qualities. Michael Frontani's (2004) review of the book for Journalism History is indicative of this larger failure, because while he gushed at the supposedly "trenchant description of the media's functioning in a war that may well either make or break the [Bush] administration's efforts to secure reelection," he did not bother to address Schechter's admittedly sloppy research (Frontani, 2004, p. 111). This critical lack is so vexing precisely because it demonstrates the same kind of lazy argumentation and lack of investigatory rigor that Schechter so adamantly criticizes the major U.S. media outlets for. Thus, in a way Schechter (and by extension, laudatory reviewers of his book) merely presents a lesser degree of critical failure than the mainstream American media, rather than a different kind. Because Embedded has been so critically successful (even spawning an award-winning film documentary), one expects the text to be investigated with an even more critical eye than might be applied to a piece of popular journalism, but professional reviews of the book seem to have avoided this.

Context is key

Despite the formal issues with Schechter's work, Embedded does nonetheless provide an extensive discussion of the way in which the American media simply functioned as an extension of "the Pentagon's publicity machinery" (Frontani, 2004, p. 111). Though Schechter focused on a number of different ways in which the U.S. military and civilian leadership formulated and deployed a media strategy with the obvious complicity of the U.S. news media, he views the embedded reporter as the most pervasive and effective way of shaping coverage of war, although the propagandistic effectiveness of these embedded reporters could not have been possible without the much larger process of media and cultural manipulation performed by U.S. leadership. However, Schechter's chosen format precludes a genuinely detailed investigation, because as each section is merely another blog post, the book has no space in which to offer a comprehensive analysis of these tactics after the fact.

Embedded is essentially a collection of anecdotes regarding the failure of American journalism, followed by a generalized call to action on the part of media consumers. Here Schechter's reliance on the ostensible credibility lent by his career in television journalism is most obvious, because while he states that "as a media person with a 30-year track record (CNN, ABC, WBCN etc.), [he knows] that media companies are responsive to pressure when it is sustained, sophisticated and well executed," he fails to offer any concrete examples of this kind of pressure or how it might actually be applied (Schechter, 2003, p. 242). He does propose "a Media and Democracy Act, an omnibus bill that could be a way of showing how all of these issues are connected," but he does not provide any details of what might actually be included in this all-encompassing piece of hypothetical legislation (p. 242). Rather, he simply asserts that this potential legislation (that, if it actually included regulations to effectively combat the problems with American journalism would almost certainly never have passed at the time of his writing and would still be extremely unlikely now) could magically "create one easy to market and explain package of proposals that can forge a coalition with many stakeholders and constituencies" (p. 242). Schechter ends his laughably vague call to action by suggesting that if readers really want to transform American journalism into the kind of critical, investigatory institution that serves to reveal and constrain the machinations of power, they should email him with some ideas (p. 242).

Writing in a vacuum

Schechter's book is invaluable for one attempting to understand the media blitz which facilitated the Iraq War, but it regards it topic in a kind of textual vacuum, without regard for supplementary works on the same issues that might have proved helpful in providing some context. For example, in Screened out: how the media control us and what we can do about it, Carla Johnston (2000) manages to sum up in one sentence what Schechter does not really point out in his entire book:

In an attempt to increase profits, media owners and advertisers all too often abandon democratic processes and principles in order to invoke techniques of both content selection and production that are designed to frighten the public, immobilizing rather than empowering it (p. 160).

In Embedded, Schechter attempts to discuss the collusion of media and the American government in the run-up to and execution of the Iraq war without really discussing what the media actually gains from this relationship. He takes as a given the notion that governments intentionally deceive the public as a means "to soften noxious aspects of their actions for a public audience," but he offers no real reason why media organizations would likewise benefit from this deception (Jacobsen, 2008, p. 337). While Schechter's discussion of embedded journalists suggested that "access" is the carrot that keeps media entities following the official line, and he does mention that these official histories are "sold" to the public, he stops short of discussing what reimbursement the media receives for this service, and instead focuses his attention solely on the benefits to the government and military.

Thus, when Schechter notes in the introduction to Embedded that "networks like war" because "the spectacle builds ratings and revenues," he does so in such a way as to suggest that this profit motive is entirely natural and thus implicitly unassailable (Schechter, 2003, p. 18). This critical lacuna leads to further gaps that ultimately serve to hinder a true understanding of the failure of American journalism in the context of the Iraq war. For instance, Schechter disregards the ominously named "Shared Values Initiative," one of the more overt combinations of journalism, advertising, and propaganda which aimed to sell American imperialism in the guise of cultural similarity, a project only made possible by the "abnormal craving for new objects of [media] consumption" engendered by television news' transformation into a 24-hour entertainment and advertising stream (Gaither, 2007, p. 843, Danesi (Ed.), 2000, p. 158).

This problem is pervasive throughout Embedded, because Schechter seems disinterested in describing the means by which news media were "manipulating a news-report reaction, while at the same time appearing to be objective" in favor of simply repeatedly claiming they were doing so (Irani, 2007). Thus, he does not even address some of the more blatant and long-running forms of media control, such as the nearly two-decade long ban on media coverage regarding the coffins of those Americans killed in the war, which served to hide "the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan" and "control public anger over the conflicts" (Jakarta Globe, 2009, & New York Times, 2009). While Schechter's target was ostensibly the means by which dissent and support are controlled by the government through the acquiescence of the media, Embedded apparently has little interest in uncovering the actual "role of communication processes in such expressions" (Schnell, 2010). Once again, it is worth pointing out that this does not mean that Embedded is not a worthwhile text, but rather that it only provides a portion of the discussion surrounding these issues.

Some of the context lacking in Embedded is further evidenced by the numerous and far more effective examples of the public's ability to influence media coverage provided by other critics who share Schechter's views but argue them with a far more robust attention to detail and context. For example, in their book Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back, Amy and David Goodman (2006) point towards the efforts of AIDS activists to secure greater coverage of the burgeoning epidemic in the 1980s as an example of effective direct action aimed at forcing the media to fulfill its informative role (p. 283-285). Similarly, in Framing terrorism: the news media, the government, and the public, Norris et al. (2003) discuss how "in the post-World War II era, national security risks have appeared in a number of guises" which serve to provide the government and media grist for inducing fear and thus maintaining control over an otherwise critical or suspicious public (p. 27).

Schechter's work lacks this same historicity throughout, and although one might argue that this is a result of the weblog format, which usually may forgo the usually necessary contextualizing due to the fact that a blog may include relevant hyperlinks and is usually written with the assumption that the reader has immediate access to other supplementary information on the internet, the choice to reproduce blog posts without any revision means that Schechter is unable to offer any relevant evidence or examples in support of his claims, predictions, or calls to action. Thus, Embedded only ever succeeds at hinting at the kind of misinformation disseminated via the U.S. news media, and as such fails to provide the kind of damning evidence that might effectively convince readers of the dangerous complicity of the news media, such as the fact that in February of 2003 Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to read the original draft of the Bush administration's evidence arguing in favor of the Iraq war to the UN, calling it "bullshit" and reducing "one 38-page list of allegations against Iraq [...] to six pages" (Mother Jones, 2011). The issue is not that the book is based on a blog, but rather that Schechter and his publishers did not adapt the blog with an eye to the particular strengths and weaknesses of either format (as opposed to the documentary version, which used the visual medium to great effect).

Communication and Media in Embedded

Thus far Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception has been discussed in terms of journalism, with any possible critiques of the book analyzed in the context of both the book's subject (American journalism and media in general) and comparable texts which engage in largely the same project as Schechter, and from the same journalistic paradigm. Viewed in this way, the book can be seen to contain certain gaps in terms of context, but one may also approach Embedded from the perspective of communication theory in order to determine how it implicitly functions as a theoretical text, advocating a particular critical methodology even if Schechter does not explicitly state as much. Thus, by considering Embedded in the context of preexisting theories of communication and mass media, one may see how the contextual gaps in the book ultimately stem from a particular theoretical perspective, because the unspoken theoretical assumptions which Schechter relies on serve to preclude Embedded from describing the communication processes which underlie its ostensible focus.

Television as the lying eye

In addition to McQuail's Mass Communication Theory, Paddy Scannell's Media and Communication offers further insight into the theoretical assumptions underpinning Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception. In particular, Scannell's history of Marshall McLuhan's response to the emergence of television as a major means of mass communication helps to reveal a major gap in Schechter's analysis of news coverage surrounding the Iraq war, because television serves to simultaneously make content far more immediate than print while allowing for a more nuanced means of controlling information. Although McLuhan failed to predict many crucial developments in the world of media and communication, as he was seemingly enamored with television, which "had only just appeared on the horizon" and subsequently defined the limits of McLuhan's imaginative horizon, his focus on "media as 'the extensions of man'" helps to reveal why images, and in particular the moving images conveyed via television, appear 'true' in a way that makes them especially susceptible to deployment as propaganda (Scannell, 2007, p. 130, 134).

One of the most notorious instances of media complicity in the selling of the government's official line regarding the Iraq war was the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad square. The U.S. media portrayed the event as a spontaneous, joyous uprising on the part of Iraqis, and only later was the statue revealed to have been taken down by American marines. Rather than evidence of the American military's desired status as "liberators," "the stirring image of Saddam's stature being toppled on April 9th [turned] out to be fake, the product of a cheesy media op stage by the U.S. Military for the benefit of cameramen staying across the street at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel" (Schechter, 2003, p. 228). The images were especially resonant because they seemed to finally validate the claims which had previously and repeatedly been made by the American government regarding the Iraqi people's unbridled joy at the invasion and occupation, and they were accepted precisely because television and the video camera are implicitly taken to be technological extensions of the human eye, objective and incapable of falsehood. Of course, most people would readily accept that video and still images may be altered, edited, or otherwise framed in such a way as to manipulate reality, but when presented by an ostensibly accountable news media to a public steeped not in a "culture of critical discussion" but rather "a culture of consumption," these images once again take on the character of objectivity (Scannell, 2007, p. 239). Scannell's observation regarding this transformation of the public sphere from a space of criticism to a space of reception is crucial for understanding the effect of television, because television teaches receptivity, which in turn makes the work of television easier.

Considering that Schechter was a television producer for some thirty years, it is striking that he does not discuss the crucial importance of television as the central medium by which the Iraq war was sold to the public. Although the brief segment on the Farbus Square statue-toppling incident mentions that "anyone who has seen a TV taping knows that tight camera angles exaggerate crowd sizes," Schechter sidesteps the fact that television made the Iraq war possible in a way previously unimaginable, due not only to its ability to present edited footage as objective reality, but also because of the cognitive compression effect, which "by compacting ideas and information for time-constrained transmission," such as in the case of the neatly packaged story of Farbus Square, "leave[s] little opportunity for reflection on the content of the messages" (M. Danesi (Ed.), 2000, p. 53). Thus, while "in human communication the only function of […] acoustic or visual messages […] is to convey meaning," in the particular case of television, this communication serves to convey meaning while simultaneously precluding analysis or criticism of that meaning (Skyttner, 1998, p. 155). Essentially, "TV literally fabricates history by inducing the impression" that what is recorded is the full extent of an event, such that an image on television becomes more "real" than reality (M. Danesi (Ed.), 2000, p. 227). Schechter's omission of the particular characteristics that make television so effective partially reveals why his criticisms and calls to action appear vague at times; he knows that there is something amiss in the way that the American news media covered the war in Iraq, but the theoretical position of the book is primed to focus on elements of the news other than the particular medium itself.

Embedded's relation to earlier communication and media theory

Examining Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception alongside McQuail and Scannell's work begins to reveal some of the implicit theoretical assumptions Schechter engages in, but in order to truly understand what level of communication the book engages in and how that effects its ultimate value as a theoretical and political argument, one must further consider the text in relation to the broader field of communication studies. In particular, considering the level of communication process that Schechter engages in as well as the type of media theory Embedded represents serves to demonstrate the book's relationship to earlier theories and debates regarding communication and media.

Before doing this however, it is useful to point out that the connection between Schecter's work and earlier theories of media are not obvious, and in many cases not intentional, because while Schechter is largely engaged in the work of a critical theorist, Embedded itself is formulated as a piece of popular nonfiction. Thus, the book takes far more pains to demonstrate the manipulation of media and communication than it does provide a theoretical understanding of the topics under discussion. Nonetheless, as was previously discussed, Embedded does have certain relevant connections to earlier media theory such as McQuail's discussion of accountability, McLuhan's analysis of television, and Scannell's observations regarding the transformation of the public sphere as a realm of criticism to one of passive reception. Nonetheless, because Embedded is not concerned with providing an explicit theoretical framework for its content, it remains difficult to pinpoint where it intersects with earlier theories of media except in the broadest terms, or else specific portions of the book that seem unaware of their own critical underpinnings. This is why attempting to locate Schechter on the pyramid as well as determine which approach he uses is so helpful, because it allows one to place Embedded within the larger context of media and communication theory even while the book itself is structured and written in such a way as to preclude this placement.

Schechter's Open Diary

Placing Schechter's work on the pyramid representing the various level of communication processes helps to reveal how the format of his text serves to preclude him from making effective, useful arguments. For the most part, one must place Schechter at the intrapersonal level, despite the fact that his text appears in an ostensibly mass form of communication (meaning a book and a blog), because his writing is essentially the near-immediate processing of information provided by the news media. The publication of his thoughts on the internet and in a book do not obviate the fact that the text is for the most part and except for the portions written by other people essentially the recording of Schechter's immediate mental reactions to the news coverage he happened to be consuming at the time. He is essentially enacting one of the first axioms of communication theory as explicated by Paul Watzlawlick, in that he is demonstrating "the inevitability of communication" by recording the simplest, most fundamental process of communication (Lutterer, 2007, p. 1022).

The solitude evidenced by Schechter's place on the pyramid makes his repeated entreaties for readers to contact him more relevant, as it reveals a desire to elevate his basic communication to a higher, more widely disseminated level. In effect, he is attempting to force his intrapersonal communication to the level of a local (albeit geographically displaced) community and ultimately to the level of mass communication that he makes the target of his musings. This phenomena reveals the somewhat liminal nature of the internet as it relates to communication theory, because things posted on the internet seem to exist on multiple levels, accessible to a mass audience while simultaneously recording the intrapersonal processing of information of a single individual.

In addition, this helps to explain the organization of the book's different sections. While the chapter titles give the impression that each section discusses a particular theme, in reality they are more frequently divided temporally, as the book and the blog from which it is adapted was written in a rough parallel with the subjects under discussion, further demonstrating the immediacy of Schechter's communication.

Schechter's Societal Approach to Media

In addition to locating Schechter on the pyramid of communication processes, one may additionally discuss Embedded as one of four different approaches to media theory. In particular, Embedded may be seen as an example of a society-centered approach to media theory, because Schechter seems to see the problems in American journalism as indicative of a larger flaw in American society. Recognizing that Schechter takes this approach in his discussion of media serves to demonstrate the reason for some of theoretical gaps discussed in the comparison with McQuail and Scannell, because Schechter's exclusive focus on society necessarily excludes some of the technological and economic forces at work in the U.S. news media. Thus, Embedded lacks the critical insight into forms of control and media ideals offered by McQuail's largely culturalist approach, the recognition of technology's disruptive potential offered by McLuhan's media-centered approach, and the stark realism and quantitative demands offered by a materialist approach.

That Schechter wrote Embedded with a societal approach to media and communication is self-evident, as he frames the entire discussion within the discourse of society and its flaws. The problems Schechter sees (and more importantly, the solutions he suggests) do not have to do with the manipulation of cultural or the deployment of certain technologies, but rather a society-wide perversion of incentives, fixable only through the mass movement of individuals asking for a different kind of news media. Schechter either does not see or does not care about the structural, cultural, technological, and material forces which have created the political and economic world which now exists, because he believes that these other considerations ultimately pale in comparison to the ability of mass movements to drive social change. In the end, then, Schechter's almost pitiful request that readers send him an email regarding what to do about all of these problems is merely the most direct example of his societal approach.

Conclusion and further questions

The critical and journalistic critiques of Danny Schechter's book Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception presented here provide the opportunity to propose useful questions regarding the role and function of the news media in contemporary society. In particular, one must wonder if inclusion in that news media precludes one from being able to effectively criticize or investigate it. Put another way, if Schechter does not describe in detail the means by which the news media and the U.S. government colluded to sell the war in Iraq, does this represent a larger inability on the part of the news media itself to recognize its own failures due to underlying theoretical assumptions? In addition, does any critical work lose its political potency if it is absorbed into mass media, or can a text be both universally accepted and critically relevant? Furthermore, Schechter's theoretical position leads one to question whether media theory benefits from a relatively rigid delineation between approaches, or if there is a more productive way of combining critical perspectives into an eclectic mode of investigation and explanation, in much the same way that one might imagine a more effective version of Embedded that recognizes the particular strengths and weaknesses of different formats. In the end, Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception offers an important look into the process of manipulation through popular media while implicitly challenging the reader to confront the theoretical assumptions underlying any reception of said media.