Mike Yon has a scathing evaluation of the embed process run by CENTCOM in the Weekly Standard:
Censoring Iraq
In a counterinsurgency, the media battlespace is critical. When it
comes to mustering public opinion, rallying support, and forcing
opponents to shift tactics and timetables to better suit the home team,
our terrorist enemies are destroying us. Al Qaeda's media arm is called
al Sahab: the cloud. It feels more like a hurricane. While our enemies
have "journalists" crawling all over battlefields to chronicle their
successes and our failures, we have an "embed" media system that is so
ineptly managed that earlier this fall there were only 9 reporters
embedded with 150,000 American troops in Iraq. There were about 770
during the initial invasion...
Michael Fumento has been blogging from Iraq and has a great read about real journalists that embed and the others who tell stories from their hotel rooms.
Covering Iraq: The Modern Way of War Coorespondence
...Most rear-echelon reporters seem to have studied the same handbook, perhaps The Dummies’ Guide to Faux Bravado.
It usually begins with the horrific entry into Baghdad International
Airport. Time’s Baghdad bureau chief, Aparisim Ghosh, in an August 2006
cover story, devotes five long paragraphs to the alleged horror of
landing there.
It’s “the world’s scariest landing,” he insists, as if he were an
expert on all the landings of all the planes at all the world’s
airports and military airfields. It’s “a steep, corkscrewing plunge,” a
“spiraling dive, straightening up just yards from the runway. If you’re
looking out the window, it can feel as if the plane is in a free fall
from which it can’t possibly pull out.” Writes Ghosh, “During one
especially difficult landing in 2004, a retired American cop wouldn't
stop screaming ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ I finally had to slap him on the
face – on instructions from the flight attendant.”
The Associated Press gave us a whole article on
the subject, titled “A hair-raising flight into Baghdad,” referring to
“a stomach-churning series of tight, spiraling turns that pin
passengers deep in their seats.”
I’ve flown into that airport three times now; each time was
in a military C-130 Hercules cargo plane, and each landing was as
smooth as the proverbial baby’s behind. But Ghosh is describing a
descent in a civilian Fokker F-28 jet, on which admittedly I have never
flown. (It’s $900 one-way for the short hop from Amman to Baghdad, and
therefore the transportation of well-heeled media people.) So I asked a
reporter friend who frequently covers combat in the Mideast and Africa,
and has also frequently flown into Baghdad on those Fokkers. “The plane
just banks heavily,” he said. “It’s not a big deal.” He requested
anonymity, lest he incur the wrath of other journalists for spoiling
their war stories...