TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021191/0211220.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 78

How Dailies Cover a TV War


After a slow start, newspapers play catch-up with fresh angles,
skeptical analysis and a blizzard of lively graphics

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- Reported by William Dowell/Dhahran and
Leslie Whitaker/New York, with other bureaus


    Covering the gulf war is a tough assignment for any
journalist, but consider the poor newspaper reporter. Hamstrung
by pool restrictions in the field, overshadowed by glamorous
TV correspondents, dependent for much of their information on
CNN, daily scribes can be excused for feeling a bit
underutilized. "A friend took a picture of me the other day
taking notes in front of a television set," says Kim Murphy,
who is reporting from Saudi Arabia for the Los Angeles Times.
"That's what being a war correspondent has come to."

    Editors back home are grappling with the same kind of
problem. In a story so thoroughly dominated by television, the
daily press has been the forgotten news medium. Print
journalists, of course, have long recognized that TV has
changed the rules of their game. But the gulf war is raising
anew tough questions about the newspaper's role in a world
where television has become the instantaneous and nearly
universal source of breaking news.

    Like the TV networks, newspapers jumped into the gulf story
with all guns blazing: banner headlines, pages of coverage,
reams of special features. And like the networks, they have
attracted a bigger audience. The San Francisco Examiner, one
of the nation's few remaining afternoon dailies, has seen its
street sales increase 25% since the start of the war. Big-city
dailies like the Washington Post (circ. 781,000) and the
Philadelphia Inquirer (circ. 520,000) have sold 10,000 to
20,000 extra copies a day. "Obviously, our readers see things
first and very dramatically on TV," says Post managing editor
Leonard Downie. "But the information is fragmentary and
sometimes contradictory. We think our readers have an appetite
the next morning for having it sorted out."

    During the first few days of TV's saturation coverage,
newspapers seemed to provide little more than a reiteration of
stale news. But the print press has since been playing
aggressive catch-up. Last week's most eye-catching scoop came
from Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, who reported in the
Washington Post that despite the allied air successes,
confidential Pentagon assessments revealed that "important
parts of Saddam Hussein's war machine have not yet been
significantly hurt."

    Newspapers with strong international coverage, like the New
York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, have weighed in
with stories from around the globe that TV has missed, like a
report in the Monitor last week asserting that China had tried
to circumvent the embargo against arms shipments to Iraq. Even
papers that usually pay little attention to foreign coverage
have sent reporters to the gulf region, and several have
uncovered fresh news. The San Francisco Chronicle's Carl Nolte,
for example, reported last week that some troops at the front
are short of key pieces of equipment and basic items like soap.
The Los Angeles Times, which has been offering the most
extensive and informative daily coverage of the war, has
published a steady stream of enterprising features on such
topics as the history of Dhahran and the effort by military
lawyers to make sure allied troops obey the rules of war.

    To attract an audience conditioned by TV, moreover,
newspapers are spicing up their coverage with additional
charts, maps, boxes and other visual devices. "This is an
editor's story so far," says George Harmon, associate professor
of journalism at Northwestern University. "Newspapers have to
make sense out of a mountain of information. Packaging is
important." The Los Angeles Times is running information boxes
atop each page of its daily gulf coverage, containing everything
from thumbnail sketches of U.S. battleships to marginalia like
the origin of the term "mother of battles" (it comes from an
Arabic phrase meaning ultimate battle). The Chicago Tribune ran
a full-page, full-color "Young Reader's Guide to the Gulf War."
Statistical roundups, "War at a Glance" boxes and Middle
Eastern weather maps abound.

    The stress on visual packaging and short bursts of
information marks another step along the TV-influenced trail
blazed by USA Today. But newspapers have also offered
thoughtful analysis of the war, often more skeptical than TV's.
The New York Times put a notably downbeat spin on General
Norman Schwarzkopf's upbeat briefing on the air campaign last
Wednesday: "Although [Schwarzkopf] presented a picture of a
devastatingly effective allied air war against Iraq," the
front-page analysis began, "the kind of destruction he
described is a slow process and the extent of its success in
incapacitating Iraqi ground forces may not be known for weeks."
The dailies have also paid more attention to the antiwar
viewpoint than TV has, both in their news pages and in
commentary by such dissenting columnists as Newsday's Jimmy
Breslin.

    Media analysts doubt that the war-inspired boost in
circulation will reverse the long-term slide in newspaper
readership. But print journalists insist that the war is
showing what dailies do best. Thomas Winship, former editor of
the Boston Globe and now president of the Center for Foreign
Journalists, contends, "The newspaper top-to-bottom wrap-up,
which was the staple of World War II, has come back into its
own. So much is incomplete on TV, newspapers are a godsend to
the public." Whether the public fully agrees is far from
certain, but despite TV's air superiority in the gulf,
newspapers clearly are not ready to concede the field just yet.