Press Coverage: Volleys on the Information Front

By Richard Zoglin

The briefing was lengthy, packed with information and as candid as any the Bush Administration had yet given on the gulf war. But when General Colin Powell trotted out the visual aids last week, things got a bit fuzzy. One chart, showing the decline in Iraqi radar activity under allied bombing, was virtually devoid of numbers. Still, said Powell, the gist was accurate. "Trust me," he said. "Trust me."

That could be the battle cry from an emerging theater in the gulf conflict: the information front. Despite the deluge of words and pictures, analysis and speculation, pouring forth on TV and in print, the supply of reliable, objective information about the war's progress has been scant. Most of the dribs that have been released are coming from -- or have been carefully screened by -- Pentagon officials or their coalition equivalents. Inevitably, frustration with that eye-dropper approach has been on the rise, particularly among correspondents trying to cover the action. For others, less concerned with that friction than with monitoring the progress of the war, a pair of crucial questions came to the fore: Are they being told enough about what is happening on the battlefield? And can they trust what they are being told?

Disgruntlement among the press was roiling all week. Press briefings in Saudi Arabia grew testy, as tight-lipped officers evaded questions as simple as what the weather was like over Iraq. Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams was fending off more attacks than an Iraqi supply depot. "There is a beast of war out there, an elephant we're trying to describe," said a frustrated Forrest Sawyer on ABC's Nightline. "Based on the information we're given, we're about at the toenail range." Pentagon briefings, meanwhile, churned out sterile numbers (1,000 sorties a day, 80% of them successful) and confusing generalizations (Saddam's communications network was cut; then it wasn't).

Powell's relatively forthcoming press conference was a response to the demand for better information. But it did not stem the complaints of reporters in the field. Hampered by a pool arrangement that restricts them largely to specified trips arranged by military officials, correspondents grew restless -- and possibly reckless. Late in the week, a vehicle belonging to CBS-TV correspondent Bob Simon and three colleagues was found abandoned near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. Their whereabouts was still not known by the weekend, but they had apparently struck out on their own -- something allowed but discouraged under Pentagon rules -- to try to find out more about what was going on.

What is going on? Despite the saturation news coverage, Americans remain ignorant of countless details about the gulf operation, from the exact targets being hit in Iraq to the morale among U.S. troops on the front lines -- wherever those might be. Part of the problem, of course, is the nature of the war thus far. Most of it is taking place in the skies over Iraq, territory that is inaccessible to reporters. Confusion has also resulted from a mix of Pentagon obfuscation and reporters' unfamiliarity with military jargon and many technical details. It took nearly a week, for example, for the press to learn the definition of such terms as air superiority and the 80% success rate attributed to allied-bombing sorties.

All of this is exacerbated by the delicate problem facing journalists in any war: how to communicate events fairly and accurately without revealing confidential military information. The problem has been made even tougher by the advent of live, satellite-fed TV communication. While U.S. viewers are watching air-raid alerts and Scud attacks as they happen, so are the Iraqis, via CNN. One ill-advised sentence or too revealing a picture could put troops in danger.

Reporters acknowledge, and always have, that restrictions are necessary in wartime. They voluntarily adhered to security guidelines for press coverage during the Vietnam War. Yet they are now feeling the heavy hand of the Pentagon in a more direct fashion. In Vietnam reporters were free to travel almost anywhere they wanted in areas under nominal U.S. control. With the restrictive gulf pool system, military escorts stand by while a limited number of journalists conduct their interviews. Pentagon officials insist that the pools are intended to help reporters gain access and to avoid the nightmare of more than 700 journalists all trying to reach the front lines at once. "Having reporters running around would overwhelm the battlefield," says Colonel Bill Mulvey, director of the military's Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran.

Logistics, though, is hardly the military's main concern. All press reports from the gulf must be passed by military censors, who look for taboo details such as troop locations or hints of future operations. Their ostensible aim is to protect the lives of American servicemen, a goal no journalist would decry. But complaints are growing about the arbitrary and dilatory way in which the censors are operating. When ABC News wanted to report that the pilot had been rescued from a downed F-14, military censors refused to allow the plane to be identified. Reason: the F-14 carries a two-man crew, and the Iraqis would know to look for the other member. "That sounded perfectly reasonable to us," says Richard Kaplan, coordinator of ABC's coverage in Saudi Arabia. "Then 20 minutes later they have a briefing, and the briefer says, 'An F-14 was shot down, and we picked up one of the pilots.' "

Similarly a report from New York Times correspondent Malcolm Browne that U.S. warplanes had hit an Iraqi nuclear installation was held up for two days while censors wrangled over wording. By the time his story was cleared, the Pentagon had announced the same news.

The military scrutiny is not only slowing the flow of information; it is also making it difficult for the public to assess the war. Forcing reporters into supervised pools, for example, reduces the chance that candid opinions or negative news about the war will be reported. "If combat boots are wearing out, as they did in Vietnam, or weapons are not working, somebody has to be there to report it," says ABC correspondent Morton Dean. "If we're not there, who is going to do it?"

Elsewhere in the gulf, the press is operating under other tough restrictions. Israel has long required that all material relating to military security be subject to censorship. Revealing such details as the exact location of Scud missile hits is forbidden. (The information could theoretically be used by the Iraqis to improve their targeting.) After a Scud attack in Tel Aviv, NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher broadcast prematurely that there were casualties; Israeli authorities retaliated by cutting NBC's satellite link. NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw had to apologize on air for the inadvertent violation before the line was restored. "We apologized for telling the truth," said NBC News president Michael Gartner later. "And that really grates on you."

The few dispatches from Iraq itself have posed unique problems. CNN's Peter % Arnett, the last American correspondent left in Baghdad, has been filing reports via satellite with the approval of Iraqi censors. Fears that his dispatches are being used for propaganda purposes surged last week, when Arnett reported that allied bombs had hit a plant that manufactured infant formula. U.S. officials insist that it produced biological weapons.

CNN executives defend the airing of Arnett's reports so long as they are clearly identified as Iraqi approved. "The alternative," says executive vice president Ed Turner, "is to pack up and leave, and then there is no one there at all." CNN, along with NBC and CBS, also aired footage of American POWs making pro-Iraqi statements, apparently under duress. ABC refused to broadcast the statements, noting that its policy is to avoid using anything said by hostages that "furthers the aims of those holding them."

The dearth of uncensored, firsthand information about the war is forcing the press -- especially television -- to focus on the few parts of the story reporters can witness. The TV networks have continued (though with less frequency) to break in with live shots of reporters under Scud missile attack in Israel and Saudi Arabia. Some correspondents learned the hard way the pitfalls of that approach. For many viewers, the week's most memorable moment came not when General Powell unveiled his diagrams of damaged Iraqi targets but when CNN's Charles Jaco scrambled for his gas mask on the air in Saudi Arabia, in the erroneous belief that he had whiffed poison gas during an alert in Dhahran.

For all the miscues, the immediacy of television coverage has continued to overshadow the efforts of daily print journalism. But newspapers are catching up, running important pieces of reporting and analysis, like a story in the New York Times revealing that pro-Saddam sentiment is growing in Egypt. Times executive editor Max Frankel maintains that the major unexplored story of the war lies inside Iraq: "That's the heart of the war, not some Scud missile landing on a correspondent's hotel roof."

Some veteran journalists, particularly those who remember the adversarial days of Vietnam, lament the meekness with which the press seems to have acceded to the Pentagon's control of the war story. The public, however, does not appear to have much sympathy for that view -- at least not yet. "In a war, people are apt to feel that the press is being too pushy and that it ought to be less intrusive, more 'on the team,' " says Marvin Kalb, a former CBS and NBC diplomatic correspondent who heads the Barone Center at Harvard. "I think that's a perfectly natural human reaction." But if the war starts to take a troubling turn, another natural reaction may set in: a demand to know why more was not revealed sooner.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,000 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on Jan. 24 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.

CAPTION: The U.S. military is censoring reports coming out of the Middle East. Do you think it is wrong, or do you think censorship is necessary under the circumstances?

Despite this censorship, do you think you are getting enough information about the war?

With reporting by Stanley W. Cloud/Washington, Dick Thompson/Dhahran and William Tynan/New York