When Timeliness Is of the Essence : Coalition of editors, publishers and TV news directors presses issue of Gulf media policy

In the jargon of the working press, a pool is a small group of reporters who cover something and share what they see with other reporters who can’t squeeze in.

The most thoroughly documented report to date of the way the military squelched efforts by American correspondents to cover the Persian Gulf War makes the pools sound more like chain gangs.

A coalition of editors, publishers and television news directors has sent a copy to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, along with an admonition that it must never happen again.

Military escorts for these pools would step in front of a television camera if they didn’t like the way an interview was going. Press officers often finished sentences for soldiers who were being interviewed. When the loudspeakers of the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy announced the ship was heading into combat, the crew reacted by jabbing fists in the air and howling battle cries. Pool reporters were hustled below decks, apparently because it all seemed too bloodthirsty for home consumption.

Correspondents who went off on their own, either because pools reached important action late or coverage was inhibited, ran into “harassment, interference and sometimes detention,” the report said.

The result was, for the most part, a sanitized and managed view of what was happening in the Gulf, not a composite of the wild swings between tedium and terror that mark war.

“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,” the coalition said.

Retired Army Col. David Hackworth, the most decorated soldier in Vietnam and now a Newsweek writer, said he had more guns pointed at him to keep him in line than he saw in actual combat.

There is more than mere pride of presence in insisting on a return to rules more in keeping with the First Amendment. The facts that reach the public late too often lose out to the fiction that arrives first. That can hurt in years to come.

As Hackworth wrote for Newsweek recently, it turns out that only 7% of the bombs dropped on Iraq were the “smart” bombs that Air Force briefers showed over and over again on television snaking their ways into air vents to blow up targets. He quotes a military analyst as saying the renowned F-117 Stealth fighter is not “really stealthy, has a poor payload and a poorer range.” Yet its performance is being promoted as a reason for more of the same at higher prices. Americans have a right to know that “in timely fashion.”