The war in Iraq was only a week old when CNN treated its audience to a brief but remarkable event: for a couple of minutes, amidst pictures of missiles and artillery shells exploding against the night sky over Baghdad, the cable network broadcast nothing but the sound of silence. The breathless monotone of Wolf Blitzer was not heard explaining the obvious; no part-time anchor in a studio back home rattled on at length, telling a retired general what he was expected to say. As Marshall McLuhan would have pointed out, the picture was the message. Unfortunately, no CNN producers seemed to notice. After those few moments of freedom, the didactic drone of talking heads was there again, iterating and reiterating the obvious. Such repetition may be inevitable—a news network, after all, is limited to the news and nothing but the news all day long. Other networks, with a variety of other shows on their schedules, manage to cover the war in more limited time slots with reporters no less determined to get the story straight.
There has, of course, been fighting that cameras alone could not begin to cover. And much of the time when camera coverage is available, the activities of dim figures moving through the eerie green landscape of night-vision equipment requires explanation from men and women who know what is going on. "Embedded" journalists from all the media, traveling with the troops, experiencing at first hand the dangerous thrills of combat, are, of necessity, brave men and women doing a professional job under frightening circumstances.
Among them, though, are individuals of a type too often found in television: people who have come to think of themselves as an important part of the story. There is Geraldo Rivera, for example, who blundered into broadcasting information no experienced newsman would have considered putting on the air. Whether the stupid gaffe caused him to be canned by Fox News Channel or whether the Pentagon declared him persona non grata, his ego led to a childish cat fight between Fox and NBC, which was forced to fire its flamboyant correspondent Peter Arnett. Never one to shun the limelight, Arnett, who was reporting from Baghdad as he did in the first Gulf War, apparently decided his personal analysis was as important as on-the-scene journalism. Interviewed on Iraqi television, he delivered a critical assessment of U.S. strategy and tactics. That does it, said NBC bigwigs embarrassed by a barrage of criticism, you're finished. Unperturbed, Arnett promptly signed on with a London tabloid, demonstrating along with Rivera that journalism and poor judgment are not always mutually exclusive.
Without the pressure that comes with producing up-to-the-minute stories all day long, print journalists tend to turn out more thoroughly researched reports that benefit from careful planning and editing. For a change, there are fewer of the inexperienced reporters who made fools of themselves in Riyadh briefings a dozen years ago. Embedded with an individual unit, a reporter's focus is, of necessity, narrow, but his or her stories almost always reflect the advantage of not being in a desperate rush to be first with a particular bit of news. And there is little need to hype stories in competition for a front-page by-line. A war always rates the front page. Nor are there many chances for print journalists to beat their television colleagues to the punch. Often, what they have seen and heard first gets to the public during an interview with an anchor anxious for reliable information with which to keep his or her microphone from going silent, even for a few precious moments.
All in all, embedding seems to be working well. There have been some problems, of course. Arnett and Rivera are the most obvious examples. Freelancers can be another annoyance as they roam the landscape, get into trouble, and have to be taken care of by people with more important work to do. Still, the military has yet to be heard complaining. War is never without unexpected difficulties.
Lieutenant Colonel Seamon is a former assistant managing editor with TIME.