The question is: what effect is it having on the coverage of this conflict?So far it has not meant censorship. Embedded Reuters reporters have been free – subject to guidelines on not saying anything about details of tactical deployments or specific numbers of troops, or identifying casualties before next-of-kin have been informed Fair enough. Vietnam veterans tell me they followed a similar code of practice.But journalists have an uneasy feeling that in Iraq they are being used. In the context of information operational effect, an embedded correspondent is a part of the war effort. Even when a reporter resolves to be detached, the fellowship of the battlefield can influence their dispatches. If you are sharing a foxhole with American or British marines, they are your buddies The incoming artillery belongs to the foe Comrades become heroes.

You demonise the enemy.Moreover,experienced war correspondents know that they cannot “read the battle” from the front line. They are not there to file an in-depth analysis but to send what the trade calls the “colour”, as often as not fragmentary and perhaps misleading. The canny battlefield writer sends what he sees, and sets a premium on scepticism when he gets an intelligence briefing “on condition of anonymity”.I acknowledge the right of an army to exploit the media to confuse the enemy But it is our job not to fall for it. So I share a concern that, with so many reporters in Iraq, some of them novices in the art of reporting warfare, our profession may be at greater risk than usual of being a channel for disinformation.Still, I signed off more than 30 reporters, photographers and TV crew to cover this war as embeds I’m unrepentant. The pictures and the text are graphic, the access and instant satellite links without precedent. Embedding with combat units is better than being taken to the front in a pool to see selected scenes.The news executive either buys the deal or misses the action Once he has bought it, he must offset the downside He has to brief his team. And he wants to ensure that he deploys some roaming reporters – we have 20 brave journalists in Baghdad and a further 23 in southern and northern Iraq working independently – to try to balance, if not verify, what the embeds are saying.

He also needs a vigilant, and sceptical, editing desk, supported by specialist writers.No one battlefield reporter ever made sense of a war. The challenge for a news organisation is to gather the fragments in a coherent, accurate and impartial whole.. Piers Morgan of the Daily Mirror has forgotten his history. Humour during war is not a new idea, not even in the serious press.