From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is away. I'm Bob Garfield.

The news from Afghanistan this week was grim.

With the deaths of four U.S. soldiers in a bombing incident, 2009 became the bloodiest year for NATO forces since Afghanistan operations began in late 2001.

The resurgence of the Taliban and escalating violence led Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael

Mullen to characterize the security situation as, quote, serious and deteriorating.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, persists in its attempts to have two wars portrayed in the best possible light.

Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent newspaper serving the armed forces worldwide,

reported this week that the military is in effect screening journalists who wish to embed with troops.

Triggered in part by an interview on this program,

Stars and Stripes confirmed that a Washington PR firm has provided evaluations of reporters'

relative degrees of positivity. Howard Witt is senior managing editor of Stars and Stripes,

and he joins me now. Howard, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

Summarize, please, the story you printed this week. We ourselves have run into problems with the embed system. A couple of months ago, one of our reporters was barred from an embed in Mosul and Iraq,

and the stated reason from the Army Public Affairs people was because he failed to highlight good news. And then

with some further investigation last week and this week, we came to find out that there's actual

profiles that are commissioned of every reporter who is assigned or seeks to be embedded with the military.

These profiles are done by this Washington-based PR firm called the Rendon Group. And so these

profiles basically look

at a reporter's past work, whether it's positive, negative, or neutral, they lay it all out

in a pie chart, give the reporter a rating. And then they also give some very specific recommendations

as to how best to manipulate that reporter's coverage in terms of the kind of places you might embed that reporter.

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