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Foreign journalists already in the United States have also faced new difficulties and
scrutiny in the past few years. In July 2004, the Inter American Press Association asked the
State Department to reverse a decision that would require longer-term foreign
correspondents to leave the country in order to renew their visas.37 In a separate case in
March 2003, the accreditation of two journalists from the Qatar-based satellite television
channel Al-Jazeera was withdrawn for a month by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE),
amid comments by NYSE officials suggesting that the suspensions may have been linked
to the channel’s controversial coverage of the Iraq war.38
Overseas impediments to the coverage of sensitive topics. American journalists also face
new difficulties covering sensitive international stories, particularly those related to the war
on terrorism.
For their coverage of the war in Afghanistan and the initial invasion of Iraq, many media
outlets chose to have their reporters travel with military units in a practice known as
embedding. Victoria Clarke, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs at the time
of the invasion of Afghanistan, said that “on the first night of air strikes, 39 journalists
from 26 news organizations were aboard U.S. Navy ships involved in the operation.”39 In
April 2003, as U.S. and other coalition forces moved into Baghdad, there were nearly 600
American and foreign correspondents officially embedded with American military units,
including deployed ground units.40
Both media and military representatives have observed that embedding during the initial
stages of the Iraq war gave journalists unprecedented access to ground combat, which in
turn gave the American people a close look at the realities of war. In particular, television
coverage of the invasion routinely provided live battlefield video of reporters in protective
gear interviewing soldiers in their assigned units; the most striking of these were the
occasional interviews interrupted by the onset of combat.

While embedding did provide reporters with new access in some ways, it also limited the
story they could tell. Many journalists note that their embedment narrowed their
perspective, since they became attached to the military personnel around them and were
rarely permitted to leave the unit to cover other news.41 Many did not even see action
that could provide a newsworthy story. In fact, the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who
declined an embedment, estimated that of the 600 journalists reporting from military
units, only 50 to 70 of them saw any interesting combat during their tour.42
Many journalists, determined to cover the war without such impediments, chose not to
embed. Though this made them more mobile and independent, many claimed that they
were often denied equal access to coalition information and were at times even prevented
by the military from covering certain stories, like the damage left by the initial invasion in
southern Iraqi cities.43 Nonetheless, most critics agree that coverage of the initial phases
of the war was as accurate and free of government control as in any major American
conflict abroad. Furthermore, coverage of the war during the period of U.S. occupation has
been notable for aggressive reporting on the military setbacks suffered by U.S. forces,
political polarization within Iraq, alleged atrocities committed by American troops, scandals
involving American contractors, and articles that raise questions about the Bush
administration’s war policies.
Due to the dangerous nature of reporting from Iraq, journalists have occasionally become
casualties of war. In fact, the American military has even been accused of intentionally
targeting journalists whose coverage was not favorable.44 The best-known instances

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