Media Still Wait to Be Called Up

U.S. military forces are waging an unprecedented war on terrorism thousands of miles from home, but Americans eager to know how the troops are doing have had to rely largely on the Pentagon to evaluate its own success.

Major news organizations have journalists aboard several U.S. warships in the Arabian Sea, as well as in narrowly circumscribed areas of Afghanistan and in a number of surrounding countries. But the media have had no direct access to military units on the ground or to the sites from which they have been launched.

Questions about military action have often been brushed aside by Pentagon officials as venturing onto the forbidden terrain of “tactics, techniques and procedures.” Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. troops, has given only two news briefings, in contrast with his counterpart in the Gulf War, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who sometimes seemed to spend as much time with the media as with his troops.

Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that the war effort is succeeding. “We’re pretty much on our plan . . . we’re in the driver’s seat,” Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at Monday’s news briefing.

But congressional critics, and even some U.S. allies, question this assertion. They wonder if the U.S. campaign is stalling, perhaps even backfiring, given continued resistance by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, the accidental bombing of civilian targets, and the failure to capture Osama bin Laden.

Who’s right? Because of restrictions on access, U.S. reporters cannot provide much independent, firsthand observation.

Tension between the U.S. military and the media is not new. Three decades of mutual distrust and a natural, ever-widening cultural gap have made it increasingly difficult for the two to work together.

In this war--fought in a remote combat zone against an elusive enemy, with success almost as difficult to evaluate as it is to achieve--the media are finding it more challenging than ever to fulfill their obligation to tell the American people what the government is doing and how well it’s doing it.

John Barry, Newsweek’s Pentagon reporter, says access is being restricted precisely because the Bush administration and the Defense Department “don’t really know how well the war is going” and are reluctant to permit coverage that “might not be consonant with their basic message that they’re making inexorable progress toward inevitable victory.”

“They’ve had a whole series of minor tactical successes, but they don’t know if that adds up to a major strategic success,” Barry says. “They don’t even know how to measure success in this kind of war, and they’re as frustrated by that as the reporters are.”

Despite some slippage, public opinion continues to be solidly behind the military. In a Pew Research Center Poll released last week, 59% of respondents said the military “should exert more control” over reporting on the war. Only 28% said decisions on coverage should be left to news organizations.

Journalists are growing increasingly frustrated. They are frustrated because the military controls the information and the access and because the public doesn’t appear to see the media as its surrogate, as an essential, trustworthy source of information on the conduct of the war.

‘It’s fundamentally important that when America goes to war, independent journalists--in every case where it is practical and possible--be there as the country’s eyes and ears,” says Clark Hoyt, Washington editor for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. “In the long run . . . when all that people learn about the war comes through official government channels and enemy channels, it can lead to questions of government credibility.”

Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of Defense, told reporters last week that he recognizes “the need to provide the press--and, through you, the American people--with information to the fullest extent possible. . . . Defending our freedom and way of life is what this conflict is all about, and that certainly includes freedom of the press.”

But Rumsfeld and President Bush have often said that some operations will be conducted in secret and will remain secret. The Pentagon says it’s providing as much information and access as it can without jeopardizing its missions and its troops.

Journalists realize they can’t parachute into hostile territory with special operations units, and they say they don’t want to put the U.S. war effort at risk. Victoria Clarke, the Defense Department spokeswoman, says the overwhelming majority of Pentagon correspondents “support completely our concerns about operational security and troop safety” and have often checked with her when they had information they thought might put someone at risk.

Reporters knew in advance when the ground assault in the Gulf War and the air bombardment in Afghanistan would begin, and they disclosed neither beforehand.

In many instances in previous conflicts--and several times since the bombing in Afghanistan began--the Pentagon has asked the media to withhold certain details or delay certain stories, and the media have complied. The New York Times did so most famously on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962, and President Kennedy subsequently told the paper’s executive editor: “If you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”

In the current conflict, reporters want access to the staging areas for special operations forces, aboard the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk and on the ground in Central Asia.

“We want to talk to these guys before they go in and after they come back and try to get as close a sense of reality as we can,” says David Martin, longtime Pentagon correspondent for CBS News.

Journalists say that access would enable them to put a human face on the war effort and “find out what actually happened,” in the words of Robert Burns, Pentagon correspondent for Associated Press.

David Shribman, Washington bureau chief for the Boston Globe, says reporters are “so separate from the action that we don’t even know what questions we should be asking.”

Rumsfeld has endorsed nine principles of combat coverage negotiated by news organizations and the Pentagon after the Gulf War. These call for--among other things--independent combat reporting and media access to “all major military units.’ But reporters have yet to achieve either.

Even when they have been granted access, journalists have operated under Pentagon control--as when their first stories from the aircraft carriers that launched the attacks on Afghanistan were delayed several hours.

Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, said Wednesday that she had received approval for reporters to interview “soon,” by telephone or video telephone, members of the special operations units that parachuted into Afghanistan on Oct. 19. She also said her superiors had approved--and she would soon schedule--phone interviews with troops of the 10th Mountain Division, in Uzbekistan.

Rumsfeld has granted a number of interviews and has frequently given the daily news briefing as well--answering questions, Martin says, rather than simply repeating talking points, as many of his predecessors did. But Rumsfeld has been more available than revelatory.

“I’ve covered a dozen conflicts, either from Washington or from the battlefield, and to cover them well, you need as much detail as you can get, and we’re just not getting that kind of detail,” says John McWethy, veteran Pentagon correspondent for ABC News.

Rumsfeld, says Burns, has “a natural disinclination to say more than absolutely necessary in any circumstance.”

This is important, several Pentagon correspondents say, because Rumsfeld has become “the voice of this war.” He has supplanted on-the-scene military commanders who served as news media briefers in previous wars and “unilaterally shut down other channels of communication in an unprecedented fashion,” says Thomas E. Ricks, Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post.

“The kind of people we usually go to in the Pentagon for guidance on a background basis now say, ‘If they knew I was talking to you, they’d cut my tongue out,’ ” Ricks says.

This attitude arises in large measure from a deep, long-standing cultural gap between the military and the media.

The military has its mission--win the war--and sometimes, to avoid jeopardizing operations and endangering troops, that means not giving the media what they want when they want it. The news media have their mission--report the facts--and, sometimes that means disclosing failures and foul-ups, even if doing so threatens military morale and civilian support.

Journalists are skeptical and iconoclastic. They see their role in society as speaking uncomfortable truth to entrenched power. They’re inclined to challenge--and often to distrust--authority, to question everything and everyone.

The military is hierarchical and traditional. It teaches respect for and obedience to authority; ultimately, troops are trained for war, and questioning orders on the battlefield can lead to delay, distraction--and death.

Reporters have been covering military conflicts since the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, and American correspondents have been dying in combat since the Civil War. While there were occasional conflicts between the media and the military over the next century, reporters and photographers were largely welcome among the troops, who recognized and appreciated their shared risk. Some reporters became heroes to the men they covered--most notably Ernie Pyle, who wrote about the everyday lives of soldiers in World War II.

“Our soldiers always seemed to fight a little better when Ernie was around,” Gen. Omar Bradley said before Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper on an island in the Pacific in 1945.

Relations between the media and the military changed dramatically during the war in Vietnam. Journalists says the military brass lied to them by understating American casualties, overstating enemy casualties and claiming imminent victory in a war they were doomed to lose.

The military blamed critical media coverage and dramatic television footage for the erosion of public support for the war, and the Pentagon has been determined to avoid that outcome in every subsequent conflict.

Reporters and photographers were excluded from the first two days of the invasion of Grenada in 1983, and their movements and access were severely restricted during the military action in Panama in 1989 and the Gulf War in 1991.

During the Gulf War, the military spoke often of its great success with “smart bombs” and of its widespread destruction of Iraqi Scud missile launchers. In the first week alone, the Air Force claimed an 80% success rate on its bombing missions. It wasn’t until after the war that reporters learned that a great many Scud launchers were missed and that 8.8% of the bombs dropped had precision-guidance systems.

Former Pentagon analyst Pierre Sprey told a House committee after the war that “there were 70 or 75 misses” for every bomb that hit a target. That demonstrated “just how shameless” military reports were during the war, Sprey said.

Reporters are determined to avoid being manipulated again, and the only way they see to avoid that is by “flooding the area with as many people as we can, putting as many feet on the ground as we can in Afghanistan and wherever else the war is being fought,” as Tom Bowman, Pentagon correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, puts it.

Most people in the trenches still want the media present, says Maj. Patrick Gibbons, a longtime public information specialist with the Marines. “The troops think the media help them get the credit they deserve for their hard work, and the media also help show that people care what they’re doing,” Gibbons says.

“But the commanders on the ground look at it a little differently,” Gibbons says. “They know the media has a bias toward the extremes--everything is either real good or real bad. Most of what happens in war is neither, though, because it’s a slow process. The commander on the ground thinks that lacking something real good to report, the media will inevitably look for the real bad. That’s why, in a war like this, where success is especially difficult to measure, the military is taking a very go-slow approach” in giving the media access.

Just as the news media think the military often invoke “mission security” to justify withholding information and access, so these commanders think the media sometimes invoke “the public’s right to know” to justify their pursuit of scoops and sensationalism, especially stories that show military failure.

The 24-hour news cycle has contributed to the media’s rush to be first and the military’s skepticism. As recently as the Gulf War, there was no MSNBC, no Fox News and no Internet--just CNN. But news is now what Gibbons calls a perpetually “unfinished product.”

“It used to be that a reporter worked as hard as he could to get something right. . . . Now you just put it out there as soon as you know it and figure that if it’s wrong, you can fix it 15 minutes later. That’s a really big deal to a commander in the field. The fact that you can fix your mistake in 15 minutes is not a real big comfort to a commander.”

The natural cultural gap between the media and the military has widened appreciably over the years. Some of the increased friction derives from the Vietnam experience. Some comes because a generation of relative peace and the end of the military draft have contributed to a press corps short on military experience and understanding.

A 1995 report by the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center found that 74% of the journalists polled agreed with the statement that “few members of the news media are knowledgeable about national defense matters.”

Sometimes, however, the media and the military clash simply because they have different responsibilities. Soon after special operations units went into Afghanistan on Oct. 19, a few news organizations found out about it. Once the story was out, others in the media called the Pentagon, which declined to confirm it.

Shribman, of the Boston Globe, complained about this in a Pentagon meeting with Clarke last week. Shribman said the media had been responsible and disciplined in trying to confirm the report “rather than to just go up to the typewriter and just rewrite what we heard.”

But Clarke said that until all troops had “cleared the area,” the Pentagon was determined to “say as little as possible about it.”

Reporters sometimes ask questions of the military not because the public necessarily needs the information, but because--well, just because--even though they acknowledge that the answers they want could be useful to the enemy.

When Rumsfeld was asked in his briefing if special operations units had brought any prisoners or defectors back from their mission, he said they had not--and he then said he would not answer that question after future operations.

“They may not know whether we did or not,” he said. “Our goal is not to demystify things for the other side. . . . The goal is to confuse, it is to make more difficult.”

In an interview after that briefing, Andrea Stone, Pentagon correspondent for USA Today, said she understood Rumsfeld’s position. “The more confused the Taliban are, the more uncertainty they have, the better for us,” she said. “But the press doesn’t work that way. We like to know.”

The media have generally been careful to voice their disagreements and protests politely, even deferentially. At a recent Pentagon news conference, one reporter asked Rumsfeld: “With great respect, how do we evaluate your credibility when you’re answering us?”

Rumsfeld repeated earlier promises to provide “only honest, direct answers,” and while many reporters are skeptical, they say they appreciate his availability and his endorsement of the nine principles of combat coverage hammered out by representatives of the media and the Pentagon after the Gulf War.

In that conflict, military commanders often confined journalists to pools--small groups of reporters and photographers who agree to share their material with their colleagues--and then isolated those pools far from the action.

One of the nine principles says that while pools may sometimes be necessary, they “are not to serve as the standard of covering U.S. military operations.” The first and most important of the principles states: “Open and independent reporting will be the principal means of coverage of U.S. military operations.”

Though Rumsfeld says these principles may have to be “tweaked,” given the unusual nature of this war, Clarke has assured reporters they will be consulted on any changes. Meanwhile, she is working on reporters’ requests for access to staging areas for ground units.

Reporters are skeptical.

“They’ve been saying it’s under consideration for weeks,” says the Sun’s Bowman. “Are we going to hear that for the rest of the year? Into next year? My concern is they’ll keep kicking this can down the road, and then it will be over, and we won’t know what’s been done in our name.”