I am forever indebted to Sarah for sending me this link on a day she noticed I wasn't up on the net.
This will possibly create some disappointment but it is worth a read to see the media from this guy's perspective in downtown Baghdad.
Excerpt:
By the time 1AD got to Baghdad, 27 April 03, nearly all of the embedded
media had gone home. The war was over and rebuilding is never as exciting. I had to go to Brigade to have my first meeting with a Fox News crew around the middle of May -- this is important because it shows the lowest echelon at which news correspondents were operating at that time.
The Fox News crew laid out what qualified as "newsworthy: -- Women taking an active leadership role in the new government, detainee/prisoner abuse cases, any WMD news, and individual soldier contributions (such as one soldier who bought school supplies and teddy bears for Iraqis out of his own pocket.)
These were the stories deemed airable and they wouldn't respond to anything outside of that. The news crew wasn't bashful about its agenda and they made it clear that they weren't going to respond to anything outside of those story lines unless it was something really spectacular.
Fox stood out most as a network that knew what it was going to put out before it even shot the footage. Other news organizations were more subtle about what they wanted to cover but pretty much everyone had their stories written before they showed up. To Al-Jazeera especially, the video footage was merely a formality.
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