Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102240301
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY THOMAS B. ROSENSTIEL/ LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
NBC's Saturday Night Live recently opened with a skit pointedly satirizing not Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, or President Bush, or allied Commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf or even Vice President Dan Quayle.
The skit shredded the American press corps instead. Every question that the red-eyed media horde asked at a mock Pentagon briefing seemed designed to help the enemy.
Being the butt of jokes on late night television is not the only sign that the press has come to be seen as a clumsy villain in Gulf War drama. Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., recently accused Cable News Network Baghdad correspondent Peter Arnett of being an Iraqi "sympathizer." Frankly, say CNN executives, Simpson was only piling on: Callers and letter writers to CNN have denounced Arnett from the beginning.
And polls show the public agrees with the military that there should be rigid restrictions on reporters in the Persian Gulf, rules most journalists say are limiting and perhaps even distorting public perception of the war.
A key factor, both military and press officials agree, is that the public is seeing the bulk of the reporting process as it happens, in military briefings. And gathering news, like making sausage or making laws, is not always an attractive sight.
Reporters shouting questions and trying to pry information often look rude, dense and disorganized on television - especially when put up against briefers trained to appear as officers and gentlemen and who can claim military security and saving lives whenever they refuse to answer a question.
And frankly, journalists admit, some questions are dumb. One reporter, for instance, recently asked briefers whether Iraqi optical anti-aircraft artillery might change the course of the war. No, the officer said politely, this would not help the enemy much. Optical targeting merely means the Iraqis had abandoned their ineffective radar and were aiming their guns by eyesight.
In addition to seeing news gathered, the public's ability to see the war from all sides instantly also has made the media far more a weapon - and a target - than in any war before.
Iraq, for instance, followed its purported peace offer last week with another more private message to the West: It invited more U.S. news organizations to Baghdad, with the obvious intent that this would help tell the Iraqi side of the story.
"In the age of instant communications the political context is every bit as important as the military," said one senior U.S. Army official.
The press now finds itself huddled in a new and uncomfortable political bunker of its own: It has reduced access to real news, more sides are effectively manipulating it, and its reputation is being damaged to boot.
As a measure of how far the role of the wartime press has changed, it seems inconceivable today, analysts say, that any media institution or personality could emerge as a surrogate public voice and sway public opinion in the dramatic way that Walter Cronkite did during Vietnam.
The press rarely has ranked highly in public esteem. But "my sense is we have rarely been seen as distasteful as we are right now," said Jack Fuller, a Vietnam veteran who is now the editor of the Chicago Tribune.
Some, such as John Balzar, a Los Angeles Times correspondent in Saudi Arabia, put it more personally: "I was a sergeant in Viet Nam and now I am a journalist here. In both wars, I feel like I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I am going to go home and have people throw rocks at me."
If anything, anger at the press has increased since Simpson's remarks last month, editors say. The Philadelphia Inquirer saw a deluge of anger directed at it, for example, after it reported that allied troops faced shortages of certain types of munitions needed for ground war, citing Pentagon, Congressional and arms industry experts.
Readers called to criticize the paper as "unpatriotic" and for giving information that will "help the I was a sergeant in Viet Nam and now I am a journalist here. In both wars, I feel like I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I am going to go home and have people throw rocks at me. John Balzar Los Angeles Times correspondent in Saudi Arabia enemy." The Inquirer contends it was trying to point up problems that needed correcting to save American lives.
The criticism is not only from one side. At an anti-war protest in Washington last month, demonstrators held signs declaring, "Does anyone have less credibility than George Bush? Yes! The media."
Most evidence suggests people still believe what they are reading and seeing of the war. A Los Angeles Times poll finds that 65 percent of Americans think the press is offering an "accurate picture," versus 28 percent who do not. And 62 percent say the press is "unbiased" in their coverage of the war. The survey polled 1,822 Americans from Feb. 15-17 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Nonetheless, an overwhelming majority of Americans want the press controlled. Seventy-nine percent approve of the Pentagon's restrictions, and 57 percent want even stricter rules, a Times Mirror survey found last month.
That came as no surprise to the Pentagon. "We knew from doing our homework that the public would support our position on restricting the press," said one senior military official involved in shaping Pentagon press policy.
The Pentagon was studying how to conduct a television war for more than a decade, in planning sessions, military exercises, war college classes and through models of other recent wars.
Their conclusion, military planners say, is that the press in the era of instant global communications had to be carefully controlled. Pictures in particular were a powerful weapon, which could help the enemy and demoralize morale at home.
A key model became the Falklands War, in which British authorities kept reporters on board ship and briefed them after engagements occured. Often, reporters in London had more information, released by government officials there, than did the journalists purportedly in the field.
The Persian Gulf arrangements mirror the Falklands. The briefings take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, but the reporters who actually travel with troops, in organized and escorted pools, are kept in Dhahran, about 250 miles away.
But unlike the Falklands war, CNN televises the Gulf War briefings in Riyadh and Washington live, which may be making things even worse for the press.
"People see trained briefers who know something," said Stephen Hess, a senior analyst at Brookings Institution.
"Put them up against reporters who often don't know anything, who are tongue-tied and often inarticulate. The setting doesn't leave you with a sense that the journalists are terribly in command of their profession."
After an especially tortuously worded query from a reporter at the daily Pentagon briefing a week ago, for example, Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelley prefaced his answer by saying, "I'd like to sit down and diagram that sentence one day." The press corps then broke into laughter at the expense of their colleague.
One reason for such bumbling moments by the press is that journalism is a form of improvisation. News by definition is what is new and unexpected, and finding it often means groping to ask the right question at the right time.
Many of the journalists covering the war are new to the Pentagon. Normally, military officials say only about 25 reporters normally cover the beat full time. Now there are more than 100 there for a major briefing.
Pentagon officials call them "the tourists." The sign on the Pentagon press room reads "Welcome temporary war experts." And the situation in Saudi Arabia, veteran war correspondents admit, is a similar mix.
The effect of all this was not lost on Pentagon planners.
"We knew the way that reporters act in a news conference is antithetical to the way you should act when you are a guest in someone's home," said the senior military official. And in live, televised briefings, reporters, in effect, are guests in people's homes.
Some in journalism criticize the media - not only for looking poorly in briefings but for allowing themselves to be put in a position where they have to rely on the briefings so heavily.
"I am not sure that we did a particularly good job of preparing for the kind of war we were in, and so we flail about and we do it in front of everybody," said Burl Osborne, editor of the Dallas Morning News.
Bill Kovach, curator of the Neiman Foundation at Harvard, said, "We all saw this coming and we didn't do anything about it."
The U.S. military is not alone, perhaps, in understanding the potential of technology better than the media itself.
"I think satellite, instant communication has made it a little bit easier for those who are inclined to use propaganda to do so," said Osborne of the Dallas Morning News. "The Iraqis can bring in a group of Western correspondents and choose what they want them to see and that is out and on the air and in the living rooms before anyone has time to think about it, before it gets sifted, or interpreted."
This is a far cry even from Vietnam, when film was shipped overnight to Tokyo, giving officials, experts and the media a chance to add context and interpret the event. Any claim or counterclaim "would be pretty well surrounded by whatever possibilities there were before it made air," Osborne said.
"The technology has totally changed the rules," said Garth Jowett, a specialist in propaganda and the history of communications at the University of Houston. "The fact that messages flow as freely as they do changes the whole synergy of public reaction to war."
A key question now is how the public will react to press coverage of a ground war, and the heavier American casualties likely to accompany it. Many think that the press is headed for even more troubles, because it will no longer be able to play its traditional role during ground combat.
That role, said William Hammond, a historian on the military and the media at U.S. Army Center of Military History, was one in which the press represented the foot soldier, if not always the officers, generals or politicians. That certainly was the role played by Ernie Pyle, perhaps the most famous print war correspondent in World War II, who frequently chronicled the GI's complaints about poor conditions, food, or medicine.
But Pyle's reporting - he was known as the "GI's friend" - depended on his getting to talk to GIs candidly and privately. Such reporting - on TV - won't be possible today.
by CNB