NEWS ANALYSIS : With ‘Credibility Gap’ Seen, U.S. Military Strives for Damage Control With Media

The American military command had an old nemesis within its grasp and could almost savor triumph.

It had the press under control. And maybe the news, too.

Reporters were deployed in the foxholes, out on the ships and at the airfields, under the supervision of military public affairs professionals. They were living the game life of the men and women in the field. And the resulting news of the Persian Gulf War had a gung-ho, all-American tang to it that the military sought.

In the first two weeks of the war, armed forces news managers surely believed that their planning had worked--this would not be another Vietnam, where free-ranging journalists questioned and poked holes in the “official” view that the fighting was going well.

But control of the press has never been that easy for the armed forces.

And in the last couple of days, the “pool” system of bringing Persian Gulf War news to America has come under heavy fire here in Saudi Arabia.

Suddenly, the suggestion of a “credibility gap” has been raised, and military commanders are scurrying to control the damage. Increasing numbers of journalists are questioning why the Americans, particularly the U.S. Army, are asking so few correspondents to tell such a big story. They are challenging conditions that allow military officers to maintain iron-fisted controls on what journalists can see--and, to some extent, choose which journalists are allowed to see the war from the inside and which are frozen out.

In short, journalists are voicing doubts about the availability of basic, timely information from the battlefield--the feedstock for the ‘round-the-clock broadcast and expanded newspaper coverage that makes the Persian Gulf War seem so urgently close to the living rooms of America.

Public opinion polls show that Americans approve of restrictions on press coverage of the war. In that, journalists themselves are not much different.

Few if any reporters believe that everyone with a press card should have free run of the battlefield and the command bunkers. Rather, the majority of correspondents interviewed here accept the logic of pool coverage, in which limited numbers of writers, photographers and camera crews are deployed to the front lines.

The work of these pools is then relayed to rear areas, where other reporters compile the dispatches, add information from daily military briefings here and in Washington and supplement the reports with independent reporting and expertise. Together, these elements constitute the news accounts that America and the remainder of the coalition countries rely upon to follow the war.

But while they accept pool coverage and military controls, increasing numbers of journalists believe the military has gone too far with restrictions that seem aimed at information control. And, they say, the services have not gone far enough in allowing first-hand reporting from the front lines.

The problem can be reduced to military terms: Troop deployment.

Even as more journalists arrive in the war zone daily, the number of “pool” correspondents remains fixed at about 99. This includes television crews, radio reporters, magazine and newspaper writers and still photographers. They are distributed, at the discretion of the military, among select Navy, Air Force, Army and Marine units.

With more than 500,000 Americans under arms here over an area about a quarter the size of the United States, hardly a reporter here believes the number is sufficient. Newspapers, for instance, must rely on 16 journalists to cover every ground unit in the country.

“That’s absurd,” said Joe Albright, a Cox newspaper correspondent and coordinator for print press pools.

The weakness of the system was apparent during the recent nighttime probing attacks against Marine positions at several widely spaced points on the front. Reporters were spread so thin among the involved units that a clear rendering of the action was almost impossible, even many hours after the action ceased.

Maybe more unsettling: Some journalists who ignored travel restrictions and advanced toward Khafji ahead of the military-controlled pools believe they uncovered evidence that political considerations played a role in the fight. These journalists said they suspect U.S. forces pulled their punches and then generally made light of their contributions so that friendly Arab troops could dominate the battle and the news accounts of it.

At this stage of the war, perhaps, the confusion over the battle for Khafji is not so important.

But journalists were left with serious questions: What if it had been a major engagement? What if the tide of fighting was not so lopsided in favor of the U.S.-led coalition? The credibility of both the military and the press could be at stake, reporters say.

Why risk it? they wonder.

Otto Kreisher, Pentagon reporter for Copley News Service and a retired military officer, figures he knows what’s going through military officials’ minds. “You’re seeing the imprint of Vietnam on everything they do,” he said.

To try to close the supposed “credibility gap,” the military’s Central Command on Saturday significantly revised the format of its daily war briefing. For the second half of the briefing, cameras were ordered turned off and the session devoted to offering reporters “background.” This is traditionally a more informal setting, where military officers can let their hair down and respond to questions at greater length without worrying about “performing” or making a misstatement on live TV.

Many journalists applaud the addition of background time with military commanders, although CNN reporters have objected to anything their network cannot broadcast live.

To this point, however, the military has not answered the larger question of expanding the public’s access to the front lines. For two weeks, officers at the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran have posted a note indicating that expansion of press pools is likely. But there has been no follow-through, according to pool coordinator Albright.

Though some news organizations are lobbying Pentagon brass to expand the pools, growing numbers of correspondents and photographers, in frustration, are renting four-wheel-drives and heading in the direction of the front without military escort. They are finding that they are welcomed by front-line units, where soldiers and Marines almost always relish the chance to tell their stories--notwithstanding prohibitions by public affairs brass.

It is a dangerous business. Four CBS journalists already are missing on the battlefield and presumed in the hands of the Iraqis after intentionally disregarding military pool escort requirements.

But for many journalists, the imperative of getting a story makes it seem worthwhile to push the military’s restrictions to their limits.

“Some reporters are going to be the first into Kuwait city,” says Albright, “and they aren’t going to be in the pool.”