TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010890/0108220.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 113 lines

                a±
                                                            PRESS, Page 61

How Reporters Missed the War


On a tight leash, journalists assail the Pentagon's pool system



    When Allied troops stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944,
American correspondents and photographers were on hand to tell
the story. But two weeks ago, when U.S. Marines and Rangers led
the charge into Panama as part of Operation Just Cause, not a
single journalist accompanied them. The Pentagon-sancpool of
reporters did not arrive on the scene until four hours after
the fighting began, and they were unable to file their first
dispatches until six hours after that. Worse, the initial pool
report shed almost no light on the confused military situation,
leading off with the hardly titanic news that the U.S. charge
d'affaires in Panama, John Bushnell, was worried about the
"mischief" that deposed dictator Manuel Noriega could cause.
Complains pool member Steven Komarow of the Associated Press:
"We kind of missed the story."

    Responsibility for that failure lies with the military --
particularly the Defense Department's Southern Command -- not
with Komarow or his seven colleagues in the pool. From the time
the hastily summoned reporters arrived at Andrews Air Force
Base outside Washington on the night of the invasion until they
returned from Panama four days later, the Army kept them under
such tight control that journalistic initiative was all but
impossible.

    During their first, crucial day in Panama, the reporters
were kept for several hours in a windowless room at Fort
Clayton and treated to a tedious, history-laden briefing. Nor
were things much better once the poolers were allowed into the
sunlight. "To the extent we got any news at all," Komarow says,
"it was pretty much by accident." He notes, for example, that
the pool did witness looting in Panama City, but only when
their military driver lost his way. Exposure to actual combat
was also a matter of chance, as when Noriega forces attacked
the Southern Command's headquarters, about 400 yards from the
press center.

    "It was a Keystone Kops operation, especially at first,"
says Kevin Merida of the Dallas Morning News. "The military
seemed to have no concept of what our role was. The whole first
day was devoted to taking us to places where the action was
already over. It was like forming a White House pool and then
showing them an empty hall and saying, `This is where the
President spoke.'"

    Acrimony between the press and the military is hardly new.
It existed even during the fondly recalled days of World War
II, when correspondents had to wear uniforms and submit to
censorship, a practice the military abandoned in Viet Nam and
has avoided since. In response to criticism over the barring
of reporters from the 1983 Grenada invasion, the Pentagon
created a National Media Pool of rotating news organizations.
The military not only decides when a pool will be "activated"
and "deactivated" but also sets the ground rules for
participation, including understandably strict limits on what
information can be published before an operation begins.
Moreover, it allows the local commands to exercise almost
complete control over the movements of participating reporters
and photographers and acts as a traffic cop for the transmission
of copy and the shipment of film and videotape.

    That is a price many experienced journalists are willing to
pay if it means getting into a place that would otherwise be
closed to them. "Bad as the pool operation was in Panama," says
Carl Leubsdorf, Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning
News, "it was better than what we had in Grenada." Nonetheless,
says Jonathan Wolman, Washington bureau chief for the
Associated Press, "I don't like pools. I like open coverage.
Our guy just sat around in a little room, feeling frustrated."

    Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams blamed much of the
difficulty with the Panama pool on "incompetence" -- his own
and that of the Southern Command. The command's officers argued
that logistics and concern for the safety of journalists made
it impossible to permit pool members to get closer to the
action.

    So far the pool system has been tested twice under combat
conditions: during the Navy's 1987 Persian Gulf operation and
this year in Panama. Retired Major General Winant Sidle, who
headed the Pentagon commission that recommended the pool
system, has been unimpressed with the results. "If you're going
to let the media in," Sidle says, "you have to let them do
something." Others think there may be no acceptable way of
achieving that goal. "I just don't see a happy ending to this
story," says a Navy public affairs specialist. Pools, he adds,
"just don't work."

    They never will unless the military agrees to let reporters
do their job. Even then, pools cannot substitute for
hard-nosed, entrepreneurial reporting. Retired Admiral Joseph
Metcalf, who led the Grenada task force, responded to
complaints about the way the Panama pool was handled by
huffing, "But what about the reporters who were already in
Panama? They had plenty of indica tion that something was
happening. They could have found out days in advance. If they
can't use their knuckleheads, it's their own damn fault." The
admiral was being unduly harsh, but he had a point.