Embeddedness

Is it just me, or is there something distasteful about MSNBC's use of the word "embeds" to describe its people traveling with the presidential campaigns? That's EM-beds, the plural noun that first came into currency with the journalists sent into the war zone under Pentagon auspices in 2003. It didn't take MSNBC long to appropriate it -- this 2004 page served up mini-bios of the "embeds" riding with that year's crop of contenders -- and the network is still using the term today. Even in early 2004, though, the implied association with war correspondents was breathtakingly tin-eared. In early 2004 NBC had only recently lost reporter David Bloom and sound engineer Jeremy Little in Iraq. That should have been enough to prompt the cable news net to reconsider the term, no matter how much zazz they thought it added to their campaign coverage. That it remains in use four years later isn't really surprising, considering how low the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten in cable news. But it's still inappropriate, clumsy and dumb.

Originally published at Tumblr.