TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020491/02049913.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.0 KB | 232 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 44

PRESS COVERAGE

Volleys on the Information Front


Frustrated by pools, censorship and tight-lipped military
officials, the media fight for more -- and more detailed -- news
from the battlefield

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- Reported by Stanley W. Cloud/Washington,
Dick Thompson/Dhahran and William Tynan/New York


    The briefing was lengthy, packed with information and as
candid as any the Bush Administration had yet given on the gulf
war. But when General Colin Powell trotted out the visual aids
last week, things got a bit fuzzy. One chart, showing the
decline in Iraqi radar activity under allied bombing, was
virtually devoid of numbers. Still, said Powell, the gist was
accurate. "Trust me," he said. "Trust me."

    That could be the battle cry from an emerging theater in the
gulf conflict: the information front. Despite the deluge of
words and pictures, analysis and speculation, pouring forth on
TV and in print, the supply of reliable, objective information
about the war's progress has been scant. Most of the dribs that
have been released are coming from -- or have been carefully
screened by -- Pentagon officials or their coalition
equivalents. Inevitably, frustration with that eye-dropper
approach has been on the rise, particularly among correspondents
trying to cover the action. For others, less concerned with
that friction than with monitoring the progress of the war, a
pair of crucial questions came to the fore: Are they being told
enough about what is happening on the battlefield? And can they
trust what they are being told?

    Disgruntlement among the press was roiling all week. Press
briefings in Saudi Arabia grew testy, as tight-lipped officers
evaded questions as simple as what the weather was like over
Iraq. Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams was fending off more
attacks than an Iraqi supply depot. "There is a beast of war
out there, an elephant we're trying to describe," said a
frustrated Forrest Sawyer on ABC's Nightline. "Based on the
information we're given, we're about at the toenail range."
Pentagon briefings, meanwhile, churned out sterile numbers
(1,000 sorties  a day, 80% of them successful) and confusing
generalizations (Saddam's communications network was cut; then
it wasn't).

    Powell's relatively forthcoming press conference was a
response to the demand for better information. But it did not
stem the complaints of reporters in the field. Hampered by a
pool arrangement that restricts them largely to specified trips
arranged by military officials, correspondents grew restless
-- and possibly reckless. Late in the week, a vehicle belonging
to CBS-TV correspondent Bob Simon and three colleagues was
found abandoned near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. Their whereabouts
was still not known by the weekend, but they had apparently
struck out on their own -- something allowed but discouraged
under Pentagon rules -- to try to find out more about what was
going on.

    What is going on? Despite the saturation news coverage,
Americans remain ignorant of countless details about the gulf
operation, from the exact targets being hit in Iraq to the
morale among U.S. troops on the front lines -- wherever those
might be. Part of the problem, of course, is the nature of the
war thus far. Most of it is taking place in the skies over
Iraq, territory that is inaccessible to reporters. Confusion
has also resulted from a mix of Pentagon obfuscation and
reporters' unfamiliarity with military jargon and many technical
details. It took nearly a week, for example, for the press to
learn the definition of such terms as air superiority and the
80% success rate attributed to allied-bombing sorties.

    All of this is exacerbated by the delicate problem facing
journalists in any war: how to communicate events fairly and
accurately without revealing confidential military information.
The problem has been made even tougher by the advent of live,
satellite-fed TV communication. While U.S. viewers are watching
air-raid alerts and Scud attacks as they happen, so are the
Iraqis, via CNN. One ill-advised sentence or too revealing a
picture could put troops in danger.

    Reporters acknowledge, and always have, that restrictions
are necessary in wartime. They voluntarily adhered to security
guidelines for press coverage during the Vietnam War. Yet they
are now feeling the heavy hand of the Pentagon in a more direct
fashion. In Vietnam reporters were free to travel almost
anywhere they wanted in areas under nominal U.S. control. With
the restrictive gulf pool system, military escorts stand by
while a limited number of journalists conduct their interviews.
Pentagon officials insist that the pools are intended to help
reporters gain access and to avoid the nightmare of more than
700 journalists all trying to reach the front lines at once.
"Having reporters running around would overwhelm the
battlefield," says Colonel Bill Mulvey, director of the
military's Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran.

    Logistics, though, is hardly the military's main concern.
All press reports from the gulf must be passed by military
censors, who look for taboo details such as troop locations or
hints of future operations. Their ostensible aim is to protect
the lives of American servicemen, a goal no journalist would
decry. But complaints are growing about the arbitrary and
dilatory way in which the censors are operating. When ABC News
wanted to report that the pilot had been rescued from a downed
F-14, military censors refused to allow the plane to be
identified. Reason: the F-14 carries a two-man crew, and the
Iraqis would know to look for the other member. "That sounded
perfectly reasonable to us," says Richard Kaplan, coordinator
of ABC's coverage in Saudi Arabia. "Then 20 minutes later they
have a briefing, and the briefer says, `An F-14 was shot down,
and we picked up one of the pilots.'"

    Similarly a report from New York Times correspondent Malcolm
Browne that U.S. warplanes had hit an Iraqi nuclear
installation was held up for two days while censors wrangled
over wording. By the time his story was cleared, the Pentagon
had announced the same news.

    The military scrutiny is not only slowing the flow of
information; it is also making it difficult for the public to
assess the war. Forcing reporters into supervised pools, for
example, reduces the chance that candid opinions or negative
news about the war will be reported. "If combat boots are
wearing out, as they did in Vietnam, or weapons are not
working, somebody has to be there to report it," says ABC
correspondent Morton Dean. "If we're not there, who is going to
do it?"

    Elsewhere in the gulf, the press is operating under other
tough restrictions. Israel has long required that all material
relating to military security be subject to censorship.
Revealing such details as the exact location of Scud missile
hits is forbidden. (The information could theoretically be used
by the Iraqis to improve their targeting.) After a Scud attack
in Tel Aviv, NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher broadcast
prematurely that there were casualties; Israeli authorities
retaliated by cutting NBC's satellite link. NBC anchorman Tom
Brokaw had to apologize on air for the inadvertent violation
before the line was restored. "We apologized for telling the
truth," said NBC News president Michael Gartner later. "And
that really grates on you."

    The few dispatches from Iraq itself have posed unique
problems. CNN's Peter Arnett, the last American correspondent
left in Baghdad, has been filing reports via satellite with the
approval of Iraqi censors. Fears that his dispatches are being
used for propaganda purposes surged last week, when Arnett
reported that allied bombs had hit a plant that manufactured
infant formula. U.S. officials insist that it produced
biological weapons.

    CNN executives defend the airing of Arnett's reports so long
as they are clearly identified as Iraqi approved. "The
alternative," says executive vice president Ed Turner, "is to
pack up and leave, and then there is no one there at all." CNN,
along with NBC and CBS, also aired footage of American POWs
making pro-Iraqi statements, apparently under duress. ABC
refused to broadcast the statements, noting that its policy is
to avoid using anything said by hostages that "furthers the
aims of those holding them."

    The dearth of uncensored, firsthand information about the
war is forcing the press -- especially television -- to focus
on the few parts of the story reporters can witness. The TV
networks have continued (though with less frequency) to break
in with live shots of reporters under Scud missile attack in
Israel and Saudi Arabia. Some correspondents learned the hard
way the pitfalls of that approach. For many viewers, the week's
most memorable moment came not when General Powell unveiled his
diagrams of damaged Iraqi targets but when CNN's Charles Jaco
scrambled for his gas mask on the air in Saudi Arabia, in the
erroneous belief that he had whiffed poison gas during an alert
in Dhahran.

    For all the miscues, the immediacy of television coverage
has continued to overshadow the efforts of daily print
journalism. But newspapers are catching up, running important
pieces of reporting and analysis, like a story in the New York
Times revealing that pro-Saddam sentiment is growing in Egypt.
Times executive editor Max Frankel maintains that the major
unexplored story of the war lies inside Iraq: "That's the heart
of the war, not some Scud missile landing on a correspondent's
hotel roof."

    Some veteran journalists, particularly those who remember
the adversarial days of Vietnam, lament the meekness with which
the press seems to have acceded to the Pentagon's control of
the war story. The public, however, does not appear to have
much sympathy for that view -- at least not yet. "In a war,
people are apt to feel that the press is being too pushy and
that it ought to be less intrusive, more `on the team,'" says
Marvin Kalb, a former CBS and NBC diplomatic correspondent who
heads the Barone Center at Harvard. "I think that's a perfectly
natural human reaction." But if the war starts to take a
troubling turn, another natural reaction may set in: a demand
to know why more was not revealed sooner.


____________________________________________________________ The
U.S. military is censoring reports coming out of the Middle
East. Do you think it is wrong, or do you think censorship is
necessary under the circumstances?

    Wrong to censor reports           9%

    Censorship is necessary          88%


Despite this censorship, do you think you are getting enough
information about the war?

    Enough information               79%

    Not enough information           19%


[From a telephone poll of 1,000 American adults taken for
TIME/CNN on Jan. 24 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling
error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.]