Cutbacks, Lack of Access Hurt Iraq TV Coverage

The crisis in the Middle East is a conflict that refuses to cooperate with television.

In a world that more often than not makes way for TV cameras, the networks--with hundreds of correspondents, producers, photographers and staff members massing on the fringes of the conflict--can’t get into Iraq, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

“You can’t cover the story if you’re not there,” said David Miller, director of foreign news coverage at NBC. “It’s like covering a forest fire and not being at the forest fire.”

Unable to gain access even to U.S. warships, forced in some instances to report by telephone from secret locations in Persian Gulf emirates, television news from the Middle East has weighed in heavily on the side of words and lightly in terms of pictures.

Foreign correspondents--many brought in from the field because of budget cutbacks--were rousted out of new assignments in Burbank and New York and sent to makeshift Mideast bureaus. One nation on the fringes of the conflict, the tiny emirate of Dubai, has allowed reporters in, but only on the condition that the correspondents not name the country in their reports. Instead, they must say that they are reporting “from the Persian Gulf.”

“It’s an area of the world where (we) don’t have a great deal of resources, and people have to be moved from great distances,” said Robert Murphy, vice president for news coverage at ABC. “And the fact that access to Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Kuwait is impossible makes covering the story very, very difficult. You’ve got to almost set up listening posts.”

In fact, many of the local bureaus are little more than listening posts. Network crews monitor Iraqi and Saudi television and send taped copies of that footage home to New York. Reporters--including CBS lead anchor Dan Rather--frantically work the phones and prepare reports that won’t be accompanied by live pictures.

Bit even the verbal reports have been difficult to obtain: At least once this week there was no room on the primary communications satellite that links the Middle East and the United States. To get their reports home, CBS, NBC and ABC had to beam them the long way around the world, across the Indian Ocean, at a cost twice that of a normal transmission.

For pictures, crews take off in helicopters and photograph ship movements in the Gulf, said Miller. The only event to which reporters will have full access is the Arab League summit in Cairo.

“We sent a crew to the Suez Canal and got pictures of the U.S.S. Eisenhower going through,” Miller said. “And a crew got pictures of F-111s taking off from Turkey--and there aren’t supposed to be F-111s in Turkey.”

The verbal nature of the story has prompted different strategies for deploying network anchors. Rather is the only network anchor currently on the scene, with NBC and ABC saying that their anchors are better off in New York, where they can conduct on-air interviews with correspondents and world figures. ABC did say Thursday that it was sending “Nightline” host Ted Koppel to Egypt for the summit, however, where he will serve as a “sub-anchor” to Peter Jennings on “Nightly News” on top of his “Nightline” duties.

CBS’ Rather--who sources at the network say is tentatively scheduled to go to Cairo today--spent the first days of the crisis in Jordan, reporting by telephone while the network ran a still photograph of him along with a map of the Persian Gulf.

Producers and news executives say the lack of pictures has affected coverage, skewing it more toward the analytical and away from dependence on the day’s hot photos.

“We’re doing now what we were supposed to be doing all along, and that’s reporting--and not just creating pretty packages,” said Lane Venardos, director and executive producer of special events for CBS News. “We miss having the pictures because we are a visual medium, but we’re also journalists. All too often in this business the journalism gets buried under the pictures.”

So far, NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN have beefed up existing bureaus in Israel and Egypt, and established makeshift bureaus in Amman, Jordan; Dubai, the United Arab Emirates; Ankara, Turkey; and Damascus, Syria.

Ironically, reporters are working out of hotel rooms in some cities where the networks once had fully functional bureaus. Cutbacks over the past several years have led NBC to close its bureaus in Jordan and the Persian Gulf and to cut its Cairo operation to a small office with no correspondent. CBS maintains a bureau in Israel, but only a small office in Cairo and no other regular bureaus in the Middle East. And the scaling back has not been limited to the region. CBS recently closed its bureaus in Paris and Athens.

“We closed them because there was nothing going on,” said NBC’s Miller. “We just can’t keep bureaus open to look nice. We just haven’t got the money any more to keep bureaus functioning when they’re not in the news.”

The result has been a thinly stretched news corps covering a story with serious implications for not only international affairs, but--with the impending loss of oil shipments from Iraq and Kuwait--for the world economy as well.

“There’s no pinch from having cut back,” said ABC’s Murphy. “But there’s no question that if another major story in the world breaks, were going to have a hard time covering it.”

Only the Cable News Network, the 24-hour news service owned by Atlanta businessman Ted Turner, has been expanding instead of contracting its reach.

“You don’t send green hands into a story like this that could potentially be quite dangerous,” said Ed Turner, CNN executive vice president for news gathering. “It’s not an easy story to report.”

Stephen Hess, a news analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said that by cutting back their bureaus around the world, the networks risk having no experts in an area in crisis.

Coverage of the current imbroglio in the Middle East, Hess said, is a case in point.

“This is real parachute journalism,” Hess said. “There is not one person who has dropped in there who has great knowledge of the Middle East, who speaks Arabic or has a Ph.D. in Arab studies.”

Also fueling the cutbacks, Hess said, are technological improvements that allow correspondents and crews to move so quickly in and out of different parts of the world that they can be based in New York or London and still cover breaking news in faraway places.

Venardos, at CBS, conceded that there might be reporters sent to a trouble spot who have never been there before, but said that was the nature of news gathering. “Ultimately, people will be over there who will be first-timers, and then they’ll be second-timers the next time they’re over there,” Venardos said. “That’s how you get experience.”