Pentagon Adds 100 More Slots for Reporters

By: Joe Strupp The Pentagon is offering at least 100 more slots for journalists to be embedded with troops in the Persian Gulf this week, according to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, bringing the number of newspeople traveling with military units to more than 600.

"They were added as new units are being deployed," said Whitman, who declined to specify which branches of the military were increasing their presence in the region, but said at least 60,000 more troops were gearing up for Gulf assignments. "If and when more units get deployed, there may be more [embedding opportunities]."

Whitman would not disclose which news organizations had been offered additional slots, or how many each could receive. He said they had until Wednesday or Thursday to accept the additional spaces. "This means some additional embeds for smaller news organizations that did not have them in the past," he added, declining to name the smaller organizations.

Journalists began to accompany ("embedding" in military parlance) troops several weeks ago under an unusual arrangement that allows news organizations to travel with units from all four branches of the military, but under some restrictions concerning access and release of "sensitive" information. Whitman has not disclosed how many embedding slots each news organization had received, but said newspapers have taken the most and the number of slots made available to each is being based on the "reach and impact" of the news organization.

Among major newspapers contacted by E&P, The New York Times appears to have the most embedded slots, with 15, according to Foreign Editor Roger Cohen. He said the paper planned to have about the same number of non-embedded reporters in the region as well. "They are very different kinds of assignments," he said about the embeds and non-embeds. "The degrees of coverage you can do depend on the access you are getting."