Truce with the Pentagon

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

It now looks as if the next time the U.S. invades some place like Grenada, there will be reporters and photographers along. A panel of military officers and former journalists, headed by retired Army Major General Winant Sidle, has been wrestling with the issue. All the participants seem to recognize that the Reagan Administration's two-day news blackout during the invasion last October was not healthy for the military, the press or the country.

The difficulties of defining the rules for combat coverage are real. The networks, newspapers, wire services and newsmagazines were willing to testify before -- but not to be part of-- the Sidle group or any other Government body attempting to write guidelines for the press. Journalists on the panel, however, included such men as Keyes Beech, a Pulitzer-winning war correspondent, and Richard Salant, who once headed CBS News.

In the Pentagon's scramble to put together an invasion in 48 hours, press coverage simply got little consideration. The sensible solution would have been to have a small pool of journalists along, tipped off in advance, sworn to secrecy, perhaps even sequestered. The pool members would have been required to share their notes and pictures with the rest of the press. But in a nation at peace, how could such a pool have been assembled without alerting everyone? The Pentagon is now studying a proposal to have a pool always in existence, with a rotating membership ("Report to Andrews Air Force Base at midnight; we can't tell you where you'll be going").

The success of the Grenada invasion was such a lift to the American spirit after so many humiliations in foreign affairs that the press, in harping on being excluded, seemed like crybabies. A Louis Harris survey some weeks later found that a 65%-to-32% majority of Americans thought the Administration was wrong in not taking reporters along, but the press will not soon forget the public hostility it felt at the time. In the euphoria of success, the Administration got in some cheap shots. Unlike World War II, Secretary of State George Shultz remarked, nowadays "it seems as though reporters are always against us." White House Spokesman Larry Speakes quickly disavowed Shultz, only to have Reagan say what Shultz was merely implying -- namely, that since the Korean War the press has not been on "our side, militarily." He should reread history: wary of potential opposition from a determined Republican minority to the sending of U.S. troops to South Korea, Truman never tried to get a resolution endorsing his "police action" through Congress. When Presidents act in emergencies without full legal approval of Congress, they risk confusion about whose side everyone is on.

The panel of officers and journalists put such quarrels behind them and decided, in the words of Sidle, that "the media should cover military maneuvers to the maximum degree possible consistent with the security of the mission and the safety of the troops." The press, as always, is ready to honor embargoes and guidelines of conduct while resisting direct censorship. One chief worry of the Pentagon is the future possibility of transmitting battle pictures by satellite directly to American living rooms, without a military press officer to warn which pictures might jeopardize security.

The naval shelling of distant Lebanese villages points up some of the complexities of war coverage and the difficulty of formulating rules. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was impatient because the Navy could give him no evidence of bombing results. American reporters, however, got to the scene, providing the pictures that the public had a right and need to see. CBS, at once the most aggressive of the networks and the one quickest to make sweeping judgments, visited a Druze mountain village. The viewers were not told how many residents Martha Teichner of CBS talked to among the bombed-out homes. But in this land riven by years of fratricidal killing, the Navy shelling came across as one more unendurable agony. Teichner confidently proclaimed that the shelling has "taught them to hate the United States." She may be right, but the generalization sounded bigger than the evidence produced.