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THE NEWS MEDIA
In this war, embedded reporters more often are men

By Bella English, Globe Staff, 4/6/2003

Night after night, you see them on your television screen, helmeted, scruffy, and somber, bringing news from the front lines of the war. They are journalists, many of them embedded, the term now as much a part of the military lexicon as MREs or elite Republican guard. And most of them, it appears, are men.

Though women have reported from the battlefield since World War II and have covered danger zones from Rwanda to Bosnia, the majority of high-profile, front-line journalism jobs in the Iraq war are held by men. The Pentagon, which organized embedding as an experiment, says it simply gave the news organizations the slots, and they chose whom to send.

''We contacted the Washington bureau chiefs and said: `Here are the openings. You give me the names of who you want to fill them with,' '' said Major Tim Blair, a Pentagon spokesman. ''No, I don't think women are any more vulnerable than men out there. They're all reporters, there to do a job.''

Blair said the Pentagon does not know exactly how many of the roughly 600 embedded reporters are women. But a quick check of two units, the Army's Third Infantry Division and the First Marine Expeditionary Force, shows that less than 10 percent of the reporters riding along with the troops are women.

Many of the women accompanying military units under the Pentagon program are reporting on US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf or reporting from Central Command in Qatar.

Of its 18 embedded journalists, CNN has sent three women: Becky Diamond, reporting from the USS Milius; Diana Muriel, with the British forces; and Lisa Rose Weaver, with the 52d Air Defense.

CNN's male reporters -- Walter Rodgers with the Army's Seventh Cavalry; Alessio Vinci and Art Harris with the Second Marines, Martin Savidge with the Seventh Marines, and Karl Penhaul with the 82d Airborne -- have seen most of the action on camera.

The network's star correspondent -- Christiane Amanpour, who made her name during the Persian Gulf War -- is considered unilateral, not embedded, and is traveling with British troops.

Like most news outlets, CNN asked for volunteers to go to war. Spokeswoman Marea Battle said the journalists' ''work ethic, commitment to accuracy, integrity, and the ability to report meaningful and important stories were the qualifications that were considered.''

Kathleen Currie, deputy director of the International Women's Media Foundation in Washington, D.C., said there are fewer women reporting from Iraq than in past danger zones. ''It seems there were more women covering wars like Bosnia and Afghanistan,'' she said. ''One theory that has been laid out to me is that it's hard to be independent and cover this war. It's a more controlled situation.''

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, has a theory: Perhaps more men than women asked to go to the front lines.

''There is a kind of boys with toys mentality to covering a war,'' he said. ''It's possible that more men reporters want to make their bones covering the war.''

Still, some of the best war reporting he has seen has come from women, Rosenstiel said.

According to the Washington Post, ABC has 17 embedded reporters, including two women; CBS has 19, including six women; NBC has 10 reporters in Iraq, all men. And all of Fox's reporters in Iraq and Kuwait are men.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has two reporters in Iraq, both women. Katherine Skiba, 46, is embedded with the 101st Airborne, and Nahal Toosi, 25, is embedded with the First Marine Expeditionary Force. Both volunteered. A third staff member chosen, a male, ''had second thoughts'' and did not ultimately go to Iraq, said Carl Schwartz, the paper's senior editor for national and international news.

Schwartz said that Skiba, who is the Washington bureau chief, made it clear that '' `if someone was going, I want it to be me.' ''

On a recent program, veteran BBC war correspondent Kate Adie said that women war correspondents she has talked to felt they ''could not possibly say no to an assignment in a war zone, because it is . . . held by the men, who are nearly always in charge of the newsrooms or the TV channels, to be the ultimate accolade.''

If a woman turns it down, Adie said, she fears ''she will drop out of the career race and still also be characterized in the newsroom afterwards as, `Oh, well, wouldn't go to war.' ''

This story ran on page A32 of the Boston Globe on 4/6/2003.


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