Dodging the bullets and the brickbats: the "embedded" voice in the Iraq war

The 2003 war in Iraq introduced the practice of "embedding" reporters with coalition forces, which led to some controversy concerning the particular relationship it occasioned between the military and media. The BBC\u2019s coverage was denounced in some quarters as being anti-interventionist, which led to a commission being appointed to investigate the claims. The present study is based on a corpus of BBC embed reports, in which there appears to be a conscious effort to avoid bias and report opposing viewpoints. However, by combining the quantitative techniques of Corpus Linguistics and the qualitative methodology typical of discourse analysis, an inherent ideological position can nonetheless be gleaned. The findings are often in contrast with those of the commission's report