From Media/Military Relations in the United States, Occasional Paper # 10, by Douglas Porch, July 2001:
Writing of the “Gulf War pool system”:
...Ultimately, in the view of media cognoscenti, the Gulf War pool system produced a mediocre product. It seemed to these veteran reporters an undifferentiated pap, distilled from the collective observations of the few journalists allowed into the field, rather than the creative perceptions of individual reporters free to fashion stories out of the raw drama they observed. They thought the journalistic quality of pool stories “depressing. . . . [A]bout one in ten has anything in it that’s useful. . . . It’s really pretty superficial stuff.”37
Pools, therefore, are not popular with the press, which sees them as attempts to limit access and thereby censor, even manipulate, information. The immediate postwar result was the issuance of new guidelines…
Concerning “embedding”:
... Journalists’ objections to the pool system, and the advent of humanitarian operations has seen the revival of “embedded” journalists. American intervention in Bosnia in December 1995 saw the expansion of “embedded media,” a concept that had been experimented with the year before in Haiti....
and:
...In many respects, “embedding” is hardly a novel concept, but revives World War II and Vietnam practices. In Haiti, the less historically-minded re-discovered that “embedded” reporters usually bonded with their units, better understood the difficulties of the military’s missions, and tended to file favorable reports....
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From Naval War College Review, Winter 2002, Vol. LV, No. 1, “NO BAD STORIES”: The American Media-Military Relationship, by Douglas Porch:
...Wearing the uniforms of officers, journalists joined press camps attached to and moving with combat forces. Print journalists, more or less “embedded” in units, wrote, often poignantly, of the horrors of battle and the suffering of the GIs. Twenty-seven reporters accompanied the D-day assault in Normandy. The precursor of the modern “press pool” emerged among radio correspondents, serving as a “neutral voice” representative of all correspondents....
and:
...Both pools and “embedded reporters” foreshadowed recent practice;…
and:
...The advent of “operations other than war” and journalists’ objections to the pool system revived the concept of “embedded media,” an approach first used in World War II and Vietnam, applied in Haiti in 1994, and expanded for the Bosnia intervention the next year. In this arrangement, a reporter is assigned a unit, deploys with it, and lives with it throughout a lengthy period of operations....
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I suspect that “embed (n.)” might be found in documents on military/media relations about Hati from 1994 or Bosnia from 1995.
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I also found “embeddee” in Is Embedded Journalism Really New?, by Tom Engelhardt, Monday, April 7, 2003:
...Looked at in a slightly wider frame, what is the Washington press corps but a set of embeddees, practicing a collusive trade…
...It’s a perfect example of embedded journalism, Washington-style, from a pussycat of an embeddee....
...It evidently didn’t occur to embeddee Bumiller that two people close to the president…
...Sanger is a long-term Washington embeddee and his piece tells us…
...It works so much better when no one bothers to point out to you, no one even thinks that you’re an embeddee....
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And “embedee” was seen in The War Show, Issue #63, April 2003, ”The War Show, it’s clear, is all about winning. “Truth on the battlefield” is overrated”, by Cynthia Fuchs:
...the Show’s newest and most astounding innovation, the embedded correspondent (also known as the embed or the embedee). Each is assigned to a unit, according to the Pentagon, “living, traveling and going into combat with it....
...At once horrifying and seductive, addictive like The Real World, the War Show invites you to identify with your favorite embedee....
