THE ROAD TO WAR
Being There
Suddenly the Pentagon Grants Access to the Action, But the Devil's in the Details
"The idea of journalists allowing themselves to be taken under the wing of the United States military to me is very dangerous. I think journalists who agree to go with combat units effectively become hostages of the military."
—Former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw
Are the pessimists right to worry? The ground rules that leaked from the Pentagon last month regarding reporters slated to be embedded with troops in Iraq — living and traveling with them — seemed to validate Shaw and his fellow skeptics. Indeed, when (and if) the second gulf war comes, the roughly 500 embedded journalists will be prohibited (on paper at least) from:
- reporting about ongoing missions (unless cleared to do so
by the on-site commander);
- reporting on the specific results of completed missions, or
on future, postponed, or canceled missions;
- breaking embargoes imposed on stories for "operational
security" reasons;
- reporting specific numbers of troops, aircraft, or ships below
very large levels;
- traveling in their own vehicles.
Reporters must sign a document stating that, among other things, their embedding assignments can be terminated at any time and for any reason.
Much of this can reasonably be defended under the banner of ensuring the safety of the troops, but the rules are so broad they left some journalists wondering just what they will be able report, and when. "Operational security is something about which reasonable people can disagree," says Kathryn Kross, the Washington bureau chief for CNN. "They must balance our need to be where the action is with the needs of the military to operate undisturbed. It will be interesting."
The Pentagon has called embedding a "historic" shift, and in its thirty-year cold war with the press over battlefield access the plan does seem to represent a new era in openness. By most accounts, the military gets credit for trying to mend the rift with the press that opened up in Vietnam. Pentagon officials and Washington bureau chiefs met twice, in October and January, to discuss how embedding will work. Nearly 300 news organizations have requested access, 20 percent of them foreign. (Not only will reporters from al-Jazeera be embedded with American troops, but reporters from Itar-Tass and China's Xinhua news agency will be with the soldiers, too.) The Pentagon is providing smallpox and anthrax vaccinations, as well as chem-bio gear, to all embedded reporters. And though reporters are to bring their own transmission equipment, the military has pledged to help them get the story out using its equipment if necessary.
The official rationale for the new policy is that the war in Afghanistan convinced the military brass that the best way to counter enemy propaganda about things like civilian casualties is to let credible reporters see for themselves. The new policy promises improvements over the situation in Afghanistan, where coverage of much of the conflict was severely restricted. For instance, in Afghanistan reporters were not allowed to identify soldiers by name and hometown; in Iraq they will be allowed to do so with the soldiers' consent. Also, the new ground rules state that the reporters' safety is not reason to exclude them from an operation, and that the standard for release of information is Why Not Release?, rather than Why Release?
The devil, though, on these and nearly all other battlefield eventualities, is in the details. The leaked document, which was first disclosed February 14 on Editor & Publisher's Web site (CJR later obtained its own copy), is intended as a guide for public affairs officers. Specific ground rules for each unit, according to Major Tim Blair, the military's media contact on embedding, will be established when reporters get to their units. "And those ground rules will change from mission to mission and location to location," he says. The military's guiding principle on embedding is "security at the source," which essentially means that individual unit commanders will have considerable say over what reporters can and cannot do.
Charles L. Lewis, the Washington bureau chief for Hearst Newspapers, who was embedded as a pool reporter in the first gulf war, says that "security at the source" conjures the following conversation: "The local commander will say to the correspondent: ‘You can come into our tent and look over our shoulder, and we will be very up front with you and show you what we are going to do. But in return for that access I need to look at your copy before you file. Now, if you don't want to do that, you can stand over there and when we have something that we want to tell you, we will.'" That system could work both for and against the press, Lewis says. "If you get a commander who understands and is sympathetic to the press's mission, it can work in your favor. There were a couple of those in Desert Storm."
Veteran military reporters say the gap between what the Pentagon puts down on paper and what actually happens in the field can be broad. Rules break down over time; enforcement can be uneven; people disobey. (Some reporters also note that embedding was a dish cooked up by the civilians in the Pentagon, and that such broad and restrictive-sounding ground rules were, at least in part, the spoonful of sugar that the military needed before it would swallow the idea of embedding.) "During Desert Storm, we worked so hard to get everything right on paper," says Lewis. "But on-site commanders have huge leeway to do what they want, and as long as the commanders are successful Washington is very deferential."
"Successful," of course, is a key word. Both unit commanders and their military and civilian superiors tend to be eager to have the press see and report on quick triumphs that involve few U.S. or civilian casualties. As in Vietnam, the military does not like bad news. The Pentagon document does specifically state, however, that "These ground rules recognize the right of the media to cover military operations and are in no way intended to prevent release of derogatory, embarrassing, negative, or uncomplimentary information."
Still, some of the more delicate media-military flashpoints are not specifically addressed in the Pentagon ground rules. What happens when the press witnesses civilian casualties? Or friendly fire incidents? Some Pentagon officials insist that such information would be immediately available to the press — once it does not affect operational security. Others privately question that. (Battlefield casualties, meanwhile, can be reported as long as the soldiers' identities are protected for seventy-two hours or until their next of kin are notified, whichever comes first.) Bryan Whitman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense, says there will be no specific rule to govern such things as civilian deaths or friendly fire incidents. Once again, then, it seems the decision is up to the unit commander.
Reporters stuck with restrictive unit commanders are not without recourse, at least on paper. If a ruling on a story can't be resolved at the unit level, then the office of the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in Washington is the final authority. But a volatile commodity like news doesn't have a lengthy shelf life.
Even if the rules are tight, there is a certain advantage to simply being there. In Afghanistan, in part because much of the war was fought with secretive Special Operations forces, there were what one Pentagon reporter calls "black holes in history." With reporters embedded, the logic goes, even information that is censored from real-time reports may eventually get out — in the big-picture magazine and analysis pieces, as well as in the books and documentaries that will surely follow. "This is all going to come out," says Sig Christenson, a military reporter for The San Antonio Express-News and a founder of Military Reporters and Editors, a group formed in February 2002 to promote better access and more informed coverage of the military. "All these people who are saying they have to have every story right now are just going to have to grow up a bit. There is more at stake than just your reputation, and if you have to wait half a day to file it isn't the end of the world." The press, he says, must do its part to earn the military's trust, just as the military must earn the trust of the press. "With a little luck this could be the best-covered war in history," Christenson says. "Without that luck it could be something else entirely."
Most in the press realize that part of the bargain for the access that embedding affords is that they cede a degree of control to the military. Nevertheless, embedding can be an important component of coverage. It may work best for the types of "soldier-in-the-sand" stories that Ernie Pyle wrote and Bill Mauldin drew during World War II. "Nine out of ten stories done by embedded reporters will be positive," predicts Christenson. "The people at the Pentagon know this. But unlike in Afghanistan, where the press coverage was severely limited, the American people will see our troops by and large doing their jobs under difficult circumstances and acquitting themselves as hard-working professionals." One producer at Fox News said, "Even if we never get a story out of an embed, you need someone there to watch the missiles fly and the planes taking off. It's great television."
But the consensus of the more than twenty bureau chiefs interviewed for this piece is that their idea of access is not the same as the Pentagon's. "There is no perfect world with embedding," says The Washington Post's Phil Bennett.
War can be chaotic and unpredictable, and reporters covering
it need to be flexible. So for most news organizations, embedding
will simply be another angle on the war, not the centerpiece of
coverage. "We're going to have our people in as many
places as possible, and hope that ten percent of them hit paydirt,"
says Mark Thompson, a Washington correspondent for Time. "Because
there are going to be a lot of dry holes."
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