John Pilger examines how war reporting has been shaped and controlled by military and government interests, from the trench censorship of World War One through the bombing of Hiroshima to the embedded press corps covering Afghanistan and Iraq. He interviews journalists and former officials about the practice of embedding reporters with military units, a system that grants access in exchange for control over what gets filmed and printed. Pilger argues that this arrangement has turned modern combat into what he calls an electronic battlefield, where the flow of images matters as much as the fighting itself, and where civilian casualties are routinely underreported or omitted. The film sets embedded coverage against the rarer instances of independent reporting that broke through official narratives, asking what gets lost when journalists depend on the military for safety and access. Pilger's own decades of war reporting inform the interviews throughout, giving the film a firsthand perspective on how the profession has changed since Vietnam.