Jeff Millman: Objectivity? Not this time around

Welcome to The Walter Rodgers Show!

If you haven't seen it yet, read this viewer's guide and watch it as soon as possible because it's simply incredible. It's on CNN between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., his dispatches sometimes lasting the entire time.

What happens is Walter, a reporter "embedded" with the Third Squadron, Seventh Cavalry of the U.S. Army Third Infantry Division, sits in a "soft skin" Humvee, usually second in a heavily armored column behind either an M1 Abrams tank or a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Of all the Americans in Iraq, Walter is perhaps the deepest and most forwardly deployed. As he points his videophone forward while ducking to avoid sniper fire on both sides of the road, he brings all of us sitting in our living rooms to, as he likes to say, "the point of the spear."

Walter brings it straight, and he is loved by the tens of millions who watch him. Nothing about Walter indicates he is a reporter. There is no "press" disclaimer on his flack jacket; he is fully equipped with standard-issue combat fatigues, a "Kevlar" (battle helmet), a charcoal-lined chemical suit and gas mask. He sees the night terrain in black and green blobs, and he talks like a procurement lobbyist. Walter explains such things as, "You can have all the 'shock and awe' you want, but what wins wars is having as much artillery on the ground as you can."

Walter doesn't get bogged down in Basra. He's "bringing a fist" straight to Baghdad. While the generals speak to us from a $250,000 Hollywood-imported set in Qatar and our civilian leaders say absolutely nothing of value from Washington, Walter speaks from the scene. Walter reminds us of the field general we never see anymore: like Napoleon on his horse or Patton on the beach, he puts a charge into this battle, at least for us at home.

Now, some of you might be wondering if a deployed Walter can also be a detached Walter. The early answer is no. The embedded reporters are losing what remains of their objectivity as they bond with the troops. If American reporters didn't have the courage to ask probative questions before the war, it's hard to imagine they will do so now, while they literally owe their lives to the ground forces probing Iraq.

There's an old saying that truth is the first casualty of war. The cheerleading press arouses our sense of kinship and responsibility for our troops. It's certainly true that the Pentagon has co-opted American reporters to deliver psychological blows to the Iraqi leadership, who undoubtedly keep track of events via CNN on satellite. But so far, the Pentagon has had more trouble controlling the stories than in past wars.

What happened on Sunday is a good example. Before the Pentagon was even aware of an Iraqi ambush on an Army convoy, U.S. cable outlets were showing Al-Jazeera footage of dead G.I.s and prisoners of war. Eventually, the networks complied with a request not to show the footage so the military could first contact the troops' families, but the information was out there and beyond institutional control.

This live and fluid war reporting -- the ultimate reality TV -- is very costly for the Pentagon, which wants to sustain our public mood anywhere between support and jubilation. According to a Gallup Poll released Monday, after Friday's "shock and awe" aerial bombardment, 62 percent of Americans said the war was going "very well." The next day, after seeing the horrific footage of the corpses and the captured, that number dropped to 44 percent.

Jumping on the skeptics' bandwagon, many of the ex-generals in the parade of televised analysis are dogging the battle plan. And as military officials cried of Geneva Convention violations, former U.S. NATO commander Wesley Clark sympathized with the Iraqis, saying, "Fair is the way you fight when your survival is not at stake."

The Pentagon wants us to believe that this war is clean and that we are winning. Sure we're winning, but the "embeds" have proved that this will not be, in television parlance, a rerun of the first Gulf War. Remember in 1991, when reporters fawned over Schwarzkopf when he claimed that the Patriot missiles had "near-total success" at shooting down Scuds? Or that this whole war was portrayed as a video game that could be appreciated by videos of smart bombs and before-and-after satellite photographs? Well, we found out later that not a single Patriot actually worked (apparently, reporters forgot to check in with Tel Aviv), and we found out last Sunday that this war is not so clean.

The Pentagon complains that the reports from the field are accurate but lack context. These complaints are invariably much louder on the days our troops meet fierce Iraqi resistance. While it's true the embedded reports lack context and are biased, they provide more clarity to the 63 percent of Americans who watch this war very closely and have become accustomed to unchecked Pentagon spin. As John Maynard Keynes once said, "I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong."

Jeff Millman is a senior Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major from Los Angeles, Calif.

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