Active-Duty Marines Have Been "Reverse Embedded" As CNNMoney, Chicago Tribune Interns
Much ink has been spilled (and pixels published) over the fact that journalist Michael Hastings was denied the opportunity to embed with soldiers in Afghanistan following his widely-read Rolling Stone piece on General Stanley McChrystal — a piece that eventually resulted in the end of McChrystal’s military command. However, the Pentagon has continually and successfully done just the opposite: “reverse embedding” active-duty military personnel in internship positions at various media outlets in order to obtain insight into how these companies gather news and particularly how they cover the military.
The Upshot’s John Cook has written a fascinating investigative piece looking into this practice, which has included embedding Marines in positions at CNN Money and the Chicago Tribune.
Writes Cook:
Under the Training With Industry (TWI) program, and others like it, military officers can leave the service for up to a year to work for private companies. The idea is to allow them to gain skills and insights outside the military that can help them with both their future career development and their present military mission. Each year institutions as varied as the American Culinary Institute, Pfizer, and Lockheed Martin participate in the program.
The program made headlines — and was, evidently, dismantled for some time — in 2000 after international media outlets reported that CNN had invited several U.S. Army psychological operations soldiers to serve as interns.
The program seems to have been reinstated, however, according to documents referenced by Cook. Christa Robinson, a network spokeswoman for CNN, admitted that CNNMoney.com did have a Marine officer among its fold, but that this particular soldier had not taken a position related to editorial and, what’s more, the soldier in question reported to Time Inc, and not directly to CNN.
Records also show that, over at the Chicago Tribune, two Marine Corps public affairs officers rotated through different positions at the paper between 2002 and 2004, and, at some point, even worked gathering news for the paper.
Other media outlets hosting such interns through the TWI program, according to the Army, include Savannah-based television station WTOC, North Carolina’s Capitol Broadcasting Company, and Beasley Broadcast Group, which owns 42 radio stations nationwide. Other service branches contacted by The Upshot had yet to respond at the time of posting.
