“A CADS analysis of television reports from Iraq: were embeds ‘in bed’ with the coalition?”

The 2003 war in Iraq was a major media event which led to a series of controversial issues. One of those issues was the role of the embedded reporter who became a key figure in television coverage, accompanied by claims of ‘selling-out’ to the Pentagon. One way of approaching the question of whether embeds consciously, or unconsciously projected the coalition’s perspective is by means of the relatively new methodology of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). This paper explores the possibilities of CADS as a research tool and how it can be applied to a research question.