Wake-Up Calls by Machine Gun

Censorship and bullets hit correspondents' Lebanon coverage

Foreign correspondents covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon last week had their problems. Those reporting from the Israeli side were told little and saw less. In Lebanon, journalists had a surprising amount of freedom, but at a high cost. "The machine-gun and antiaircraft fire is your 5 a.m. wake-up call," said Tim McNulty, a Middle East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. "It's been a week of sustained fear, and it doesn't look like it will get any better." Said Thomas Baldwin of the Associated Press: "In Beirut it's a risk just to walk outside your office."

In Jerusalem, New York Times Bureau Chief David Shipler had a different complaint: military censorship. "It's pretty frustrating," he said. "We can go in and ask the spokesman what's going on, but we won't get very much." At the outset of the campaign, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon placed a blanket over news from the front, censoring film and dispatches and issuing only sparse communiques. Israeli correspondents called it a "fogout" or "grayout," but at times it seemed more like a blackout. In past Middle East wars, Israeli editors were given deep background briefings. "This time we are getting nothing, nothing," said Jerusalem Post Editor Ari Rath.

Foreign correspondents had their own difficulties. As the Israelis mobilized, the British Guardian's Eric Silver was dictating a story by phone to Fleet Street when a voice on the line politely asked whether his material had been submitted to the military censors. When Silver said no, his line to England suddenly went dead. One TV correspondent told of the Israel defense forces flying correspondents' material from the Lebanon front back to Israel, then confiscating the film at the airport in Tel Aviv.

For reporters in Israel, trying to get past Israeli border guards into Lebanon was a quasi-military operation. NBC Cameraman Yossi Greenberg tried the direct approach: he raced through an open gate at 80 m.p.h. in a rented car. This prompted a guard to fire over his head with an M-16 automatic rifle to try to scare him back. Later, Greenberg, like other reporters, took advantage of an opening in the 60-mile-long border fence into Lebanon. In the first two days some correspondents slipped past simply by following Israeli armored columns through the gap; the dust churned up was so heavy that busy border guards did not see them.

In Beirut, the makeshift press headquarters is the 150-room Commodore Hotel, which has its own telex lines and electric generators. All three U.S. television networks--each with as many as five crews in the field--managed to send film out daily by satellite from an east Beirut ground transmission station. The unofficial rules for Beirut-based correspondents were grim, however: stick together, do not go out at night, and never photograph Syrian troops, who detained several photographers and reportedly pistol-whipped two. By contrast, the propaganda-wise Palestinians were eager to please, providing military guides to protect reporters. Los Angeles Times Correspondent David Lamb summed up the journalists' dilemma with a comparison to Viet Nam, which he had also covered: "There it was clear who the enemy was. But here you can't tell who your friends are." qed

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