Cheney to Take Up Changes in War Zone Curbs on Press

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, bowing to complaints from news executives, agreed Thursday to consider a range of proposals designed to improve the coverage of future military conflicts in which American forces participate.

In a meeting with representatives of six major news organizations, Cheney conceded that the Pentagon’s Persian Gulf “pool” arrangements, under which small groups of reporters were given .paccess to U.S. combat units, had been bedeviled by transportation delays and communications lapses during the 100-hour ground war.

But, although Cheney assured news executives that such pools need not be the model for future war coverage, participants in the meeting said the defense chief defended the system as appropriate to the unique circumstances encountered during Operation Desert Storm.

Cheney agreed that he would review the recommendations of Washington bureau chiefs for changes in the way the Pentagon manages future war coverage. Their recommendations will be drafted into a report that Cheney is expected to receive by the end of February.

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams, who is to join news representatives in drafting the report, called the meeting “very productive.” Echoing Cheney, however, Williams cautioned that even long negotiations are not likely to bridge some differences between news organizations and the Defense Department.

“I am prepared to say that we want to work together to find the best and most effective manner of providing combat coverage consistent with our mission,” Williams quoted Cheney as telling the group during the hourlong meeting. “In some cases, that may mean pools; in some cases, it won’t.”

But Cheney told the news representatives, “I’m not wedded to the concept of anything. We want to look at the best way to do it.”

Clark Hoyt, Washington Bureau Chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, said Cheney “listened with an open mind and heard very frank comments from virtually everybody about problems--very specific ones in some cases--and of what went wrong.”

Louis D. Boccardi, president and chief executive of the Associated Press, told The Times he “had the sense that (Cheney) was hearing some of that kind of detail for the first time, that it was fresh to him.”

Boccardi, a vocal critic of the Gulf pool arrangements, added that “giving it to (Cheney) in that kind of detail might have opened his mind to the possibility this thing might not have been done as well as he thinks.”

Cheney has publicly praised the Pentagon’s handling of information about the Persian Gulf conflict. On Thursday, participants said he repeated public claims that the six-week war was the best-covered in history.

But participants in the meeting broadly disputed the characterization. They warned that, unless the Pentagon can remove obstacles to reporters’ war coverage, including intrusive military public relations officers and sluggish logistic arrangements, news organizations could forsake the Defense Department’s strictures for more free-wheeling coverage.

“We didn’t threaten him,” said AP’s Boccardi. “We raised with him the danger that, if the Gulf was the model for the way they set up future rules (governing war coverage), they risked very seriously any kind of cooperation with the press. And we made the point that, in our view, this wouldn’t serve the public interest in the least.”

“We told him we could go our way and he could go his, and that would be that, but we added that we felt that really wasn’t the way to serve the public’s interest at all,” he added.

Also present at Thursday’s meeting were Roone Arledge, president of ABC News; Katharine Graham, chairman of the board of the Washington Post; David Laventhol, publisher and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Times, and Burl Osborne, publisher and editor of the Dallas Morning News.