The Pentagon’s effort to control coverage was based on the infamous use of pools, in which small groups of reporters were taken into the field under the constant eye of military public-affairs officers. From beginning to end, this was one of the last places to find a good story. In the blame game, the real culprits are news executives who agreed to the silly rules long before the war. If they had threatened not to participate, the restrictions might well have been loosened. At bottom, the military needs TV to build and sustain support for the war even more than TV needs the military to build ratings.
Several print reporters tried working outside the pools and were arrested. The TV networks, by and large, were chastened by the early capture of CBS’s Bob Simon and his crew at the Kuwaiti border (they were finally released in Baghdad last week with the help of the Soviet Union after six weeks in captivity). Until the end, when CBS’s Bob McKeown raced to Kuwait City first for a scoop, CBS, NBC and CNN stuck with the pool rules and paid for it. Only ABC, after much internal debate, agreed to let Forrest Sawyer break free of the system. His strategy was to hook up with the Saudi and Egyptian forces, which, ironically for countries with rigid anti-press policies, were far more open to coverage than their American counterparts. The result was that ABC was the first network with footage of deserters (well before the ground war), the first (and only) to go along on a bombing mission and the first with pictures from the front. As ABC’s experience showed, the news media can be trusted to report without exposing their personnel to the hazards of the modern battlefield or interfering with military operations.
Journalists are not the only victims of the restrictive press policy. Except for some archival footage shot by the military, historians will have no record of most of the actual fighting in this war. As for the soldiers themselves, most of their heroic efforts will go unwitnessed.
Experienced reporters try to avoid most press conferences. Little real information usually comes out of them, and when it does–as at Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s–the word gets out. Here’s where the pool idea might actually make sense. Send everyone else out to report. The result would be better stories and, almost as important, protection of the press from itself. The single biggest blow to the media’s reputation was the televising of badly framed and occasionally idiotic questions at the Riyadh and Pentagon briefings. Some of that can’t be avoided–the process of news gathering is messy–but editors should not have sent reporters to the war who wouldn’t know a battalion from a brigade if their lives depended on it.
Peter Arnett in Baghdad wasn’t the problem; his reporting, however restricted, was better than nothing. The problem was at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. The network wrongly thought its boilerplate disclaimer after his broadcasts ended its obligation to provide context for his reports. This is where CNN squandered its early lead in the coverage. Its experts were no better or worse than the others. But with a few exceptions, the CNN correspondents–viewed too often as interchangeable parts–did not usually analyze as well as the competition.
Of course, much of the analysis by the networks amounted to little more than treading water. Countless hours were spent on military diagrams of dubious accuracy. Using the media to confuse the enemy is part of fighting a war. And speculation is half the fun of covering one. But the time devoted to it was disproportionate. In a larger sense, increasingly scarce TV news resources were misallocated. Why was it left to PBS to air a documentary exploring Saddam Hussein’s past? Why didn’t all of the networks air carefully prepared historical and geographical programs like Peter Jennings’s fine “Line in the Sand”? The bias for live coverage–even when nothing was happening–meant less insight overall.
Cheerleading is unnecessary, and it cheapens the coverage. Even the use of “we” to describe the allied side undermines the professionalism with which a war is supposed to be reported. Dan Rather getting teary and shaking hands with Lt. Gen. Walt Boomer should have been done off camera, where human emotions would not interfere with a story that was plenty dramatic on its own. Contrary to what the ads for local news shows say, real journalists keep their feelings from getting in the way.
But commendable dispassion should not be confused with neutrality. In a war like this one, full “objectivity” is not only impossible, it’s dishonest. No reporter can be expected to resolve whether he is a journalist first, or an American. He (or she) is some combination of the two. The proper approach is to neither assume the U.S. government is always lying, nor always telling the truth. Trust, but verify, as Ronald Reagan used to say.
And what if verification–independent reporting–is impossible, as it was so often in the gulf? With its quick win, the Pentagon will surely try to repeat its press policy the next time. The only answer is to keep banging on the door, looking under rocks and avoiding worry about being popular.
