PERSPECTIVE ON THE GULF WAR : Marching Orders for the Media : With life and livelihood on the line, reporters are cozy with the military, whose burning wish is to manipulate them. Some newspeople seem nearly to be soldiers.

It is not easy for journalists to exercise self-criticism when they are reporting history. And to cast doubt on the word of American or British officers in the Persian Gulf is to invite almost immediate condemnation. Those of us who reported the human suffering caused by Israeli air raids in Beirut in 1982 were told we were anti-Semitic. Any expression of real skepticism about American military claims in the Gulf thus provokes a parallel accusation: Have we taken Saddam’s side?

Three weeks after the start of the war, journalists in Saudi Arabia have allowed themselves to be duped by the Western authorities, forced either to participate in pool reporting under military restrictions or to work independently at the risk of having their press accreditation taken away. In theory the “pool” means that the reports of journalists traveling with military units are available to all television networks and newspapers. In practice, it means that the only reporters officially allowed to witness events at “the front” have their reports read and often changed by military censors.

It should be said at once that almost all ordinary soldiers are invariably friendly and helpful to journalists. It should also be said that there are journalists in the “pool” who are valiantly and successfully filing dispatches that describe the unhappiness as well as the motivation of soldiers at war, the boredom as well as the excitement, the mistakes as well as the efficiency. But many of their colleagues can claim no such record.

Most of the journalists with the military now wear uniforms. They rely on the soldiers around them for advice and protection. Naturally (and justifiably) fearful of that coming land war, they also look to the soldiers around them for comfort. They are dependent on the troops and their officers for communications, perhaps for their lives. There is thus the profound desire to fit in, to “work the system” and a frequent absence of critical faculties.

This was painfully illustrated when Iraqi troops captured that abandoned Saudi border town of Khafji. Pool reporters were first kept up to 13 miles from the sighting and--misled by their U.S. military escorts--filed stories reporting the recapture of the town. But when the Independent traveled to the scene to investigate, an American television reporter who was a member of the military pool tried to obstruct this with the words: “You (expletive)--you’ll prevent us from working. You’re not allowed here. Get out. Go back to Dhahran.” He then called over an American Marine public affairs officer who announced: “You’re not allowed to talk to U.S. Marines and they’re not allowed to talk to you.”

It was a disturbing moment. A journey to Khafji revealed that the Iraqis were still fighting in the town long after the British prime minister had claimed outside No. 10 Downing Street that it had been liberated. For the American reporter, however, the privileges of the pool and the military rules attached to it were more important than the right of a journalist to do his job.

The American and British military have thus been able to set reporter up against reporter, to divide journalists on the grounds that those who try to work outside the pool will destroy the opportunities of those who are working--under military restriction--within in. That is why, when an enterprising reporter from the (London) Sunday Times managed to find the Staffordshire Regiment in the desert, he was confronted by an angry British press officer who claimed that if he did not leave, “You’ll ruin it for the others.”

The “others,” however, already have problems. When American correspondents on the carrier Saratoga quoted the exact words of Air Force pilots, they found that the captain and other senior officers deleted all swear words and changed some of the quotations before sending on their dispatches after a delay of 12 hours.

At one American air base, a vast banner is suspended inside an aircraft hangar. It depicts an American “Superman” holding in his arms a limp, terrified Arab with a hooked nose. The existence of this banner, with its racist overtones, went unreported by the pool journalists of the base. A pool television crew did record Marine Lt. Col. Dick White when he described what it was like to see Iraqi troops in Kuwait from his plane. His words are worth repeating: “It was like turning on the kitchen light late at night and the cockroaches started scurrying. We finally got them out where we could find them and kill them.” These remarks went unquestioned, although there was certainly one question that was worth putting to the colonel: What is the “new world order” worth when an American officer, after only three weeks of war, compares his Arab enemies to insects?

The unquestioning nature of our coverage of this war is one of its most dangerous facets. We seem to have become so certain that this is a conflict of good versus evil that we are on many occasions failing to use our critical faculties. Some reporters are now behaving as if they were soldiers rather than journalists. There is a euphoria, a jubilation about some reports that makes them almost indistinguishable from the material that daily appears in Stars and Stripes, the American military journal.

Many of the American television pool dispatches sound as if they have been produced by the military, which, in a way, they have. For the relationship between reporter and soldier here is becoming almost fatally blurred.

Reporters who are working independently of the military have been threatened not just with the withdrawal of their accreditation but with deportation from Saudi Arabia--even though they willingly comply with all the security guidelines, which preclude the reporting of military details that could be of use to Iraq.

The system may be convenient for the military but it is pernicious for the press. Reporters who worked in Vietnam are now decribing official military briefings in Riyadh as even more uninformative than the notorious “5 o’ clock follies” in Saigon. This is supposed to be a war for freedom but the Western armies in Saudi Arabia--under the guise of preserving “security”-- want to control the flow of information. There could be no better proof of this than the predicament of the French television crew who filmed the Khafji fighting at great risk to their lives, broke no security guidelines and then had their tape confiscated because they were not members of the pool.

We probably do not yet appreciate how sad and humiliating is our acceptance of this system. How are we going to justify what amounts to sycophancy if the forthcoming land battle turns into a blood-bath for the West? What excuses will we find for those uncritical reports?

Generals will always blame the press for their failures, however much we bow to their rules. But when the bodies start coming home--when the West really beings to suffer--the public, whose support for this conflict is partly shaped by what it reads and sees on television, may not forgive us for our weakness.