Networks Caught Off Guard in Iran Airliner Tragedy : Regional News Media Pool in Persian Gulf Deactivated Three Days Earlier

The destruction of an Iranian airliner at the hands of a U. S. war vessel caught the White House and Pentagon by surprise and found the nation’s four major news networks off their guard too, lulled into a lazy holiday state of mind heavy on tennis, patriotism and backyard barbecues.

As Cable News Network’s Pentagon correspondent Charles Rochelle put it in a perplexed understatement broadcast early Sunday morning from the nation’s capital, “Everyone’s remarkably low-key.”

The networks’ holiday somnambulism ended at 6 a.m. EDT when bureau chiefs and executives at CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN awakened to the first sketchy reports of the shocking events in the Strait of Hormuz.

CNN, anchored by David French from Washington, filled most of the day with special reports from Iran experts, congressional representatives and, later in the day, the recurring nightmarish videotape that had been picked up by satellite from Iranian national television, depicting lifeless bodies floating in the Persian Gulf.

The normally laid-back magazine programs “CBS Sunday Morning” and “NBC Sunday Today” kept updating the news that U. S. ships had sunk a pair of Iranian gunboats and shot down an Iranian F-14 fighter jet.

But it wasn’t until several hours later that the awful truth began to emerge. Pentagon officials admitted shortly before 11 a.m. EDT that it was actually an Iranian Airbus jumbo jet with 290 passengers aboard that had been shot down by guided missiles launched from the U. S. cruiser Vincennes.

And the battle of the bulletins began.

CBS’ Washington Bureau Chief Joe Peyronnin recalled that the network’s Pentagon correspondent, David Martin, had just relieved correspondent Eric Engberg shortly after 11 a.m. and “went off into the bowels of the building.

“He called me about two minutes later, and for the first time I heard somebody say, ‘Listen, they (Pentagon officials) admit now it may not have been an F-14 and could possibly have been a commercial airliner,” Peyronnin said. “That’s when I really knew this was going to be a helluva day . . . so we put him (Martin) on the air immediately with that.”

Lesley Stahl, who had just finished her usual anchoring of “Face the Nation,” anchored Martin’s bulletin and other updates. The usual CBS Sunday night anchor, Susan Spencer, relieved Stahl for other bulletins during the day.

With the first reports at daybreak Sunday, the networks had begun recalling correspondents from their holiday weekends. CBS’ Martin, for example, cut short a trip to New Jersey, where he was visiting his parents. He did his initial reports still clad in the polo shirt and sports jacket he wore from the airport.

According to Dorrance Smith, executive producer of ABC News weekend programs, ABC’s initial network bulletin came shortly after 8 a.m. EDT, when Pentagon correspondent Robert Zelnick checked in with his first F-14 story. Zelnick weaved his ensuing reports into “This Week With David Brinkley.”

NBC Pentagon correspondent Fred Francis was aided with some live reports from Kevin Beesley, an NBC reporter in Dubai. Similarly, CBS began receiving live feeds from Allen Pizzey in Bahrain.

But the videotape that NBC, CBS and ABC aired later in their evening newscasts was the same Iranian television pictures that CNN had begun to show--repeatedly--earlier in the day. The grisly footage of floating bodies and angry, devastated relatives of the Iranian victims became as familiar to Sunday television viewers as the rote replay of the exploding Challenger space shuttle two years ago.

It was the only videotape of the tragedy available and the networks made the most of it.

Ironically, a regional news media pool arrangement in which the networks participated and which was operated in cooperation with the U.S. military, had been deactivated on June 30, just three days before the airliner shooting.

Since last July, rotating pools of five to eight American print and broadcast journalists, based either in the United States or abroad, had made at least 31 visits to the Persian Gulf, often aboard Navy ships. Last week, in what the Pentagon called a “mutual” decision by the military and news media organizations, the pool arrangement was called off.

“I think it’s fair to say that the mission has been so successful that it’s not considered big news anymore,” Navy Capt. Robert Dvornik, who heads the U.S. Central Command public affairs office in Tampa, Fla., told the Associated Press in an interview last month.

The cost of sending and maintaining reporters in the Persian Gulf was an important factor in deactivating the pool, the Pentagon said last month. The pool arrangement can, and probably will, be reactivated from time to time.

Asked if the lack of a regional news pool hampered ABC’s coverage of Sunday’s incident, producer Smith said he didn’t know.

“It’s impossible to know,” he said Sunday in an interview from Washington, “because you don’t know what you would have gotten had there been areasonable pool.”

Even had the pool been in operation, it is doubtful that the networks could have relayed footage to the United States for at least 24 hours.

News organizations now are given access to Navy ships in the Gulf on an individual basis, but the Iranian airliner incident will probably not put the media pool back in business, according to Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Keith Schneider.

“I have nothing as to when that may occur,” Schneider told The Times. “Right now, there’s no anticipation it’ll be activated with the events of today. Hopefully, that is over and done with.”

The last time the pool was used was during a three-day uneventful trip on June 17 when the USS Hancock was escorting a tanker through the gulf, said Schneider. The last time reporters were on board an American ship during a skirmish was April 18 when a five-member pool was aboard the missile frigate Jack Williams. In that incident, Iran lost six armed naval craft in the Strait of Hormuz near the same location where Sunday’s incident occurred.

The Pentagon-sponsored pool arrangement was first introduced following the 1983 U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. This so-called “national Pentagon pool” came about as a response to the uproar over the ban on press coverage of the Grenada operation.

Under the “national” pool arrangement, media representatives are alerted on a secret basis that major military exercises or operations are about to take place. A small group of print and broadcast journalists are then flown to the scene of the operation, but details of the operation are not disclosed until after pool reporters arrive and start filing reports.

The Gulf pool that was disbanded last week is a “regional” pool, according to Lt. Col. Schneider, and not the same secretive, high-level arrangement as the “national” pool.

“The last time we used the national pool was in connection with the emergency deployment readiness exercise of 3,000 troops that were sent to Honduras about two months ago, “ he said.

The last time the national pool was deployed in the Persian Gulf was a year ago, when the Navy escort of American-flagged oil tankers began.

In previous coverage of the Persian Gulf, the networks have been able to individually charter helicopters and, indeed, one helicopter chartered by CBS aided in evacuating crew members from a crude oil tanker that had been hit by Iranian gunboat fire. Network use of helicopters has slowed, however, because Navy warships have been asking them to stay clear of the zone in which hostilities are occurring or may occur.

Like President Reagan, none of the three major network news anchors abandoned their holiday weekends for the news desks. Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings were kept posted by their respective news desks. The bulletins and Sunday night newscasts were done by the usual weekend anchors--CBS’ Susan Spencer, ABC’s Sam Donaldson and NBC’s Garrick Utley.

In his late Sunday night CBS newscast, White House correspondent Bill Plante (who anchors the late Sunday broadcast) did a spot interview with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in which the ambassador promised retaliation against the United States.