Gulf War No Model for Coverage, Media Tell Pentagon

The leaders of several of the nation’s major news organizations have sent a comprehensive report on the Persian Gulf War to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, arguing “it is imperative” that the war “not serve as a model” for future coverage of military operations, the news organizations said today.

“We believe the Pentagon pool arrangement during Operation Desert Storm made it impossible for reporters and photographers to tell the public the full story of the war in a timely fashion,” says a letter to Cheney accompanying the report.

The letter, which asks for a meeting with Cheney, was signed by the presidents of the television news divisions of ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, the chairman of the Washington Post Co., the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the editors of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today and executives of the wire services and the weekly newsmagazines, among others.

The report is the most detailed of its kind prepared by the news media about the war. It cites cases of reporters being threatened, being put under military arrest by American troops and having their copy “sanitized” for reasons that were political rather than military.

The report quotes retired Army Col. David Hackworth, the most decorated soldier in Vietnam, as writing that, while covering the war for Newsweek, “I had more guns pointed at me by Americans or Saudis who were into controlling the press than in all my years of actual combat.”

During the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon imposed the tightest restrictions over press coverage in American military history. Not only did all news dispatches have to clear a “security review” not required since the Korean War, but reporters had to travel in organized pools and be accompanied at all times by military escorts. Journalists said that these escorts often acted as censors.

Pete Williams, the Pentagon spokesman, said in an interview that Cheney is “receptive” to discussing coverage of the Gulf War, though he offered no guarantees.

“We can certainly walk back through the reasons that we imposed the press arrangements that we did,” Williams said. He has said publicly that he thinks the unprecedented restrictions on the media during the war worked well overall.

The report also contains a statement of principles that the news organizations would prefer for coverage of military operations.

They include:

* That independent reporting, rather than reporting in organized pools, be the “principal means of coverage.”

* That the military set up guidelines for coverage to protect military security, violation of which could result in revocation of credentials and expulsion from the combat zone.

* That news pictures and words not be subject to any prior military review.

News executives conceded that getting the military to agree to looser restrictions might be “a very long and difficult and arduous negotiation,” said Stanley Cloud, Washington bureau chief of Time magazine.

“This is not a popularity issue” of the military versus the media, said Michael Getler, assistant managing editor for foreign news at the Washington Post. Nor is it a matter of whether or not public opinion polls favor censoring the press, he said. “It is an issue of the press being allowed to do its proper job in its society.”