Pentagon’s Press Policy in Panama

America’s press has been twice burned on a compelling matter--a right, that carries with it a duty, to cover Americans when they are sent into battle. The first time the press was blocked from covering such an operation, it was deliberate arson, no question. The second occasion may have been an accident, offering some hope that President Bush will see that it won’t happen again.

In 1983 the White House was so keen on invading Grenada with no reporters looking on that it even kept President Reagan’s news secretary in the dark so that he could deny rumors of war without lying. Nearly a year later the Administration came around, however reluctantly, to the view of a joint military and press study group that concluded that putting war off-limits to the news media was an intolerable break with American tradition.

The group, headed by Winant Sidle, a retired Army major general, declared that the press has both a right and a responsibility to cover combat operations “comprehensively, intelligently and objectively,” and the military has the responsibility for making such coverage possible.

Following Sidle’s recommendation, the Pentagon created a process in which a handful of correspondents--a “pool”--would be whisked off to cover military operations from the outset and later share accounts of what they saw with all other news media. In recent years, the Pentagon put the new procedure through no less than 10 dry runs to work out any kinks.

Nobody insists that the Bush White House or the Pentagon were bent on re-creating the blindfold of Grenada, but for American readers and viewers, the invasion of Panama just before Christmas turned out the same way. A pool of 16 correspondents flew from Washington to Panama the night of Dec. 19. They landed four hours after the invasion began, but got briefings from the Army instead of help in getting to the action. Without that first-hand look, the best-intentioned briefings in the world cannot ensure comprehensive or objective accounts of combat. What’s more, it was another six hours before pool correspondents could file even what they learned from briefings.

One reason they missed the action is that there has been a lot of turnover at the Pentagon since Grenada. Nobody in the press is sure how much Pete Williams, the newest chief of the Pentagon press office, knew about Grenada or the Sidle report--if anything. One thing that is known is that calls from the Defense Department to prospective pool members in Washington did not start until 7:30 p.m., apparently in an effort to keep any word of the invasion from leaking onto the evening television news. That concern apparently also ruled out the pool’s flying to Panama the day before the invasion with the Pentagon general who planned the operation.

But organizing a pool was secondary to Sidle’s view of the military’s first duty--helping correspondents cover combat. That could have happened if Panama’s Southern Command had simply helped American correspondents based in Panama get to, or near, the action.

Combat carries risks of error in planning and execution as well as risks of death. Every correspondent accepts the same sort of risk and, because war is by nature chaotic, the burden of knowing that the best effort will not keep mistakes from creeping into stories. Before Vietnam, both military leaders and the press understood that and shared a sense of the importance of each other’s obligations, one fighting for the country’s security, the other covering the way it was done. This shared sense of obligation needs to be restored, but it has to start at the top, with the President and the secretary of defense. The lesson of Panama is that the restoration has to begin at once.