An ocean away in Shropshire, England, Diane McCoy recoiled in horror as live footage of a gun battle in southern Iraq suddenly showed images of her son, a Royal Marine, running burning from a building after a gas canister exploded.

If "real time" coverage of a major conflict was invented by CNN during the 1991 Gulf War, it reached a whole new level in Iraq where the use of new video and satellite technology fed a continuous stream of live news pictures from the front lines.

Coinciding with the technological advances was the decision by the US and British military to "embed" hundreds of journalists with army units fighting across Iraq.

The result was live video of tanks driving across the desert borders and, three weeks later, cheering crowds in the streets of Baghdad as US Marines toppled a massive statue of Saddam Hussein.

In between, there were images of combat fighting not seen since the Vietnam War, but witnessed in real time rather than with delays of days or even weeks.

That the Iraq conflict witnessed a seismic shift in the methods of television war reporting is not in question. But the debate on whether that shift was for the better has only just begun.

"What has been lacking in so much of the instantaneous coverage is verification and historical context, the things that turn coverage into reporting," said Jack Fuller, former publisher and editor of the Chicago Tribune.

"In the absence of context, the story of the war that reaches us seems less the story of a battle than of a political campaign: the manipulation of expectation and images by all sides," Fuller said.

More than any other factor, it was the decision to allow "embedded" journalists that shaped the television coverage of the war in Iraq.

Even before the fighting began, debate raged as to whether embedding reporters amounted to sacrificing objectivity for access.

Now, with the conflict in its end-game, the jury is still out.

For Merril Brown, a senior vice president at online broadband service provider RealNetworks and founder of MSNBC.com, the access granted to embedded journalists outweighed the drawbacks.

"In this situation, the alternative to embedded reporters was reporters embedded in briefing rooms," Brown said.

"I don't see any scenario where being in the briefing room is in the better interest of the public than being in the field," he added.

But others see more insidious motives behind the embedding policy, saying it allowed the military to indirectly manipulate the coverage.

"I have to say it was one of the shrewdest moves I've ever seen," said Maria Grabe, associate professor of journalism at Indiana University.

"It enabled the military to personalise this war beneath a veneer of front-line reportage," Grabe said.

"The most obvious sign of that was the continual use by embedded reporters of the word 'we' as in 'we are being fired upon,' which obviously seriously effects any attempt to be objective."

And for all the drama of the live combat footage, the overall coverage of the fighting was heavily sanitised, with the sort of experience shared by the Gonzalez family and Diane McCoy very much the exception.

"You see a lot of firing, a lot of explosions, but you almost never see the human consequences," Grabe said. "They haven't shown adequately the impact of this war at all."

Some pyschologists have warned that watching extended television coverage of the war can extract a mental toll of viewers, causing stress, sleepless nights and even guilt in extreme cases.

A Gallup poll published this week showed that Americans were feeling more "sad" and "tired" as the war progressed.

In the first week of the the fighting, 56 percent of Americans said the war made them sad and that figure rose to 67 percent in the last week of March.

Over the same period, the number of Americans who rated news media coverage of the war as "excellent" fell from 52 percent to 38 percent.

SPACE.WIRE