Dodging the bullets and the brickbats: the embedded voice in the Iraq war

This chapter discusses the practice of "embedding" reporters with coalition forces during the conflict in Iraq, 2003. The practice led to some controversy concerning the particular relationship it occasioned between the military and media. The BBC’s coverage was denounced in some quarters as being anti-interventionist, which led to a commission being appointed to investigate the claims. A corpus was constructed of transcriptions of the BBC news coverage of the conflict, and analysed using specialised software. A linguistic analysis reveals how in reports from embeds there appears to be a conscious effort to avoid bias and to report opposing viewpoints. By combining the quantitative techniques of Corpus Linguistics and the qualitative methodology typical of discourse analysis, an inherent ideological position can nonetheless be gleaned. The findings are in contrast with those of the Cardiff commission's report.