Counterbias: Embedded - Weapons of Mass Deception (How The Media Failed To Cover The War On Iraq) Book Review

Prometheus - October 2003
286 pages - Hardcover

B O O K R E V I E W

EMBEDDED: Weapons of Mass Deception (How The Media Failed To Cover The War On Iraq)
by Danny Schechter

Danny Schechter, a television producer and independent filmmaker, is a notable figure in the media community. As a writer and speaker focused on media issues, Schechter brings to the table a more leftward viewpoint than that which is found in today’s mainstream media (no, the media isn't as 'liberal' as Fox News may tell you, and the fact that people like Schechter no longer exist in the mainstream is testament to that).

Schechter is extremely critical of the way the media has conglomerated into a mass of right-leaning, sensationalistic, pro-authority and screw-everyone-else insanity, and, as the inside jacket states, Embedded is his analysis of the media’s “cheerleading for a war in which reporting was sanitized, staged, and suppressed”.

Calling himself “The News Dissector”, Schechter runs two websites, Mediachannel.org and Newsdissector.org, the latter being his blog. For those seeking a critical view of media matters, “The Dissector’s Daily Blog” is a must-read, informative and readable, grouped with the likes of The Daily Howler, Pressbox and CableNewser.

Why introduce Schechter's new book, Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception, with a seemingly unrelated description of his blog? Well, because the book is the blog. With little much else, the book isn't much more than entries taken directly from his web writings, rearranged, formatted into a columnized, newspaper-like format, and printed in book form, with hopes of making a tidy profit (one could say that by selling the book, he wishes to disseminate his views to a wider audience, but then what audience is wider than the internet on which the book's contents already appear?).

Unfortunately, the fact that most everything in the book is simply reproduced from widely-available online form (the archives are all still online, and worth going through if time is spare), is not the book’s worst problem.

The blog-grabbing nature wasn’t constrained to content alone—even spelling and punctuation errors are taken straight from the online text, and they simply haven’t been corrected. Quality control is minimal, with spelling, punctuation, and even factual errors, all quite eminent. It’s as if the book was thrown together in a matter of days, without much contextual editing—if any at all—to go along with it.

Further, the books format—a virtual replication of blog entries—make it much less readable as a book. There is absolutely no flow to the many short, albeit interesting and informative, entries. The choppy nature of a blog, with new entries once a day or less rather than a continuous flow, mean that the book version contains much repetition that may grate on the reader’s nerves (the MSNBC Ashleigh Banfield saga that Schechter is fond of mentioning feels as though it is repeated fifty times in the book).

With all its faults, Embedded is an entertaining and somewhat informative read for citizens still lost in the pro-war media fog, who are unwilling to read 286 pages of text on a bright computer screen. The short tidbits are fun to skim and the book is a witness to the faults in the media’s Iraq War coverage. Unfortunately, Schechter’s obvious left-wing bias may turn off some, and the lazy nature of the book will likely displease most others. Schechter’s fifth book is Embedded in mediocrity. He can surely do better.

Robert Furs