War Correspondents Find They Must Master Political, Religious Issues

In the century since Civil War correspondent George Alfred Townsend collected $5,000 in donations to build a five-story monument honoring those who report on armed conflict, the job of covering war has changed greatly.

Today’s correspondents, writing about battles in places many Americans cannot pronounce--in Central America, the Middle East and elsewhere--must master complex political, religious and economic issues to tell their stories.

Nonetheless, the inscription on Townsend’s hillside monument here still describes their mission--”to narrate distant wars”--and many complaints of earlier correspondents persist, gripes about censorship and being manipulated by some governments that view reporters as propagandists.

Problems of Access

There also are the problems of access, difficult working conditions and the news media’s relationship with the military.

“The Civil War was complete anarchy as far as the press was concerned. The army didn’t supply any help at all,” said John R. Wilhelm, dean emeritus at Ohio University who covered World War II for Reuters and the Chicago Sun-Times.

“We were highly organized in World War II. We were given the rank of captain and we were to be treated as such,” he said. “We had organized press camps where they supplied us with motor vehicles, gasoline and drivers. We could go anywhere we wanted.”

Their work, however, was not without risk.

“I was sitting having lunch in Belgium, and German dive bombers came over and blew the hotel apart and killed my best man, who was sitting next to me having lunch,” he said.

Deteriorating Relationship

The media-military relationship has deteriorated, especially since the Vietnam War, Wilhelm said.

Whereas there were front lines in World War II and reporters wrote about territorial advances, journalists in Vietnam went into jungles to cover fighting on a smaller scale.

The United States sought to use the number of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong killed as a measure of progress, but correspondents said the counts often were exaggerated and conflicted with eyewitness reports.

The military provided some transportation, but reporters in Vietnam often had to find their own way to the battlefield. They hired cars from civilians and traveled without military escort on dangerous roads.

Americans rallied behind the armed forces in World War II and eagerly read Ernie Pyle’s folksy columns, which told the story of individual GIs involved in an international war.

Sort Through Facts

U.S. involvement in Vietnam was not uniformly condoned back home, and reporters often complained of having to sort through fact and fiction they got from military spokesmen who presented a rosy picture of American fighting.

One former Vietnam correspondent, George Esper of the Associated Press, said the military’s response to factual reporting during the war often was: “Why don’t you get on the team?”

Donald G. North, who in 1967 won the Overseas Press Club award for his radio reports of combat there, said the biggest obstacles to war reporters today are governments.

“Whether it’s covering a war in Iraq or Iran, or in Israel, governments in the wake of Vietnam think it’s wise or necessary to muzzle the press,” North said. “The British did it in the Falkland Islands and we did it in Grenada.”

In 1983, the U.S. military excluded reporters from covering the early hours of America’s invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada, where the White House said U.S. students at a medical school were threatened by unrest.

‘Were on Our Side’

Secretary of State George P. Shultz told a group of editors in December, 1983, that in World War II, “reporters were involved all along. And on the whole, they were on our side.” Now, he says, “it seems as though the reporters are always against us . . . they’re always seeking to report something that’s going to screw things up.”

But former President Jimmy Carter one month later criticized the coverage restrictions in Grenada, saying they were “much more repressive in nature, than anything I remember in the history of our country.”

Soon after, the U.S. government formed a commission to ease tensions between the media, military and government officials.

“The so-called credibility gap began in the early 1960s. It’s become pretty well documented that the government of Saigon was not telling the whole story, which the press claimed, and it just got worse and worse,” said Winant Sidle, a retired Army major general who headed the commission.

“And the Pentagon didn’t help any because they weren’t telling the whole story either.”

Follow Military Exercises

The Sidle commission recommended that a pool of reporters accompany future military operations. Since 1985, the press has gone with the military on eight different military exercises, including the Persian Gulf in July, 1987, when Kuwaiti tankers flying American flags were escorted through the volatile waters.

Robert L. Burke, vice president of industry and public affairs for the American Newspaper Publishers Assn., said problems arose in the Persian Gulf when journalists had to use military communication systems to send their copy back to the States.

“There were a couple incidents in which people on the ships did not want to transmit the story as written by the reporter,” said Burke, who was chief of information at the U.S. military headquarters in Vietnam in the early 1970s. “In another instance, they filed a story off a ship and it was held at the Pentagon for at least 12 hours before it was released.”

Civil War correspondents did not have such problems.

“They could walk back from the front lines,” Burke said, “and find a telegraph and file it.”

Civil War Battle

Townsend, for instance, filed this dispatch about Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan at the Battle of Five Forks in Virginia:

“Sheridan galloped everywhere, his flushed face all the redder. He galloped once straight down the Rebel front, with but a handful of his staff.

“A dozen bullets whistled for him together; one grazed his arm, at which a faithful orderly rode. The black pony leaped high in fright, and Sheridan was untouched, but the orderly lay dead in the field, and the saddle dashed afar, empty.”