Not because they have angered the military with their reporting
in Iraq (news
- web
sites), but they have covered the war unencumbered from the
Pentagon's grip as "unilateral" reporters free to roam Iraq as
roving correspondents rather than being "embedded" with a
particularly military unit.
Whether they were reporting from Saddam Hussein (news
- web
sites)'s destroyed palace in Basra or outside a cave in Sheikh
Kidri, CBS' Pelley and CNN's Arraf have covered a different war than
the embeds. "We've been able to break away and do whatever we think
is important and whatever is appropriate for that day," Arraf said
of her freedom.
Pelley, who is reporting mainly for "60 Minutes II," and Arraf,
the former Baghdad bureau chief who is returning there, have covered
opposite sides of the war: Pelley from the south, where he has had
to forage for food and supplies, and Arraf in the wild and woolly
north covering the Kurds where supplies were plentiful but the
weather and terrain frightful.
Both got closer to the war than most of the embeds, at times
reporting from the front lines. Safety concerns and smelling the
action are often mutually exclusive goals for the unilaterals.
Mortality came close to Pelley right from the start when one of
his unilateral colleagues -- the ITV's Terry Lloyd -- was killed
March 23 when his crew was attacked in southern Iraq. "We saw him
not long before he was killed," Pelley said from Basra. "We were
both trying to figure out a way get over the border. We talked to
each other and agreed it was very difficult. He went one way, and I
went another."
In the south, Pelley has wandered all over a region where any
rule of law collapsed early in the war. "I have to worry about
banditry, I have to worry about the enemy, and I have to worry about
friendly fire," he said.
Another time, Pelley and his "little band of brothers," as he
calls his three-man crew, found themselves in the middle of a
gunfight with a Marine unit in Umm Qasr.
"We were having a nice quiet Sunday morning when we started
taking incoming fire from the Iraqis," he said. "The Fox Company of
Marines charged up the sand berm, and I charged up with them. They
went into prone position and returned fire, and I was right there
with them, bellies to the sand, with my Kevlar helmet on, cheek by
jowl with Marines."
In the north, CNN's Arraf, who had just finished reporting on the
capture of Kirkut on Thursday, narrowly escaped artillery fire that
Iraqis might have been aiming at her satellite dish.
Still, she said, being a unilateral has enabled her to begin in
Dohar, near the Turkish border, and cover an area with a diversity
of ethnic populations that could still explode amid Kurdish desires
for a separate state that Turkey would never allow.
"Particularly in the north here, the game plan changed quickly
with regard to the American military. It was vital to have
flexibility," said Arraf, who extolled the ability to see "quirky
places" like a village populated by Uzidis, a small, very old
religious order that many believe -- erroneously, she said -- engage
in devil worship.
When their town was attacked, "every one of them left to go back
to the caves. It was really extraordinary," she said.
Still, Arraf conceded unilaterals are in a potentially more
perilous situation.
Those dangers are one major reason the military has little
patience for the nonembeds, who it says are more prone to get hurt
and breach the Pentagon's rules on maintaining "operational
security" for coalition troops. The two reporters who violated those
rules -- Fox News Channel's Geraldo Rivera and the Christian Science
Monitor's Philip Smucker -- were not embedded. But both CBS and CNN
reject the Pentagon's assertions, noting that neither Pelley nor
Arraf has broken any rules.
What they have done is brought a more far-reaching version of the
war home to Americans than the embeds.
Although both the media and the Pentagon have praised the new
embed system, critics have complained that reporters have trouble
remaining objective because they take on the symptoms of the
"Stockholm Syndrome" in sympathizing with people who they are
traveling with through enormous travails.
Pelley did not disagree with that prognosis but endorsed it,
saying even the unilateral reporters are still on America's side.
"You begin to identify with them, but that's a good thing. . . . The
American people get to see (the troops) as fully sketched people. It
makes the war coverage much more genuine. Do you think any reporter
worth his or her salt remains objective during the war?"
The Pentagon allowed 600 reporters to be embedded in Iraq but had
no estimate on the number of unilaterals running free.
Reuters/VNU
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