As they worked to shore up ebbing support for the Afghanistan war in the fall of 2006, senior federal officials grew concerned about the lack of positive news stories coming out of the conflict zone and asked the Canadian Forces to start supplying a list of journalists embedded with the troops and details of what coverage was planned.
The October, 2006, request came from the Privy Council Office, the bureaucratic arm of the Prime Minister's Office, e-mails obtained under Access to Information law show.
"They want to know which embeds are in theatre and what they are doing," Major Norbert Cyr, a military public affairs officer, wrote in an e-mail to colleagues in the Canadian Forces.
The Privy Council Office told the Forces that it was concerned the military wasn't sufficiently "pushing" development and reconstruction stories with embedded journalists, e-mails show.
The fall of 2006, if you'll remember (and as the article notes), was the heaviest period of combat for Canadian troops since the Korean War.
In any event, the military thought it was doing a good job on getting reporters to see the sunny side of life in the 'Stan:
"I think you will see from the movements of the embeds below and the coming plans for interviews that the [public affairs officers] have been quite successful in their efforts to get the embeds to focus their attention elsewhere than the military kinetic [combat] operations," Ms. Daly wrote.