On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television HITTING THE BEACH IN MOGADISHU BY REUVEN FRANK The tumult and the shouting had not yet died, nor the Captains and the Kings departed, when the anchormen went home from...
...Who benefits most from the impression that the reporters waiting to welcome the seals, and blind their night-glasses, suddenly appeared on the beach...
...Some took risks by remaining on hotel roofs during Scud attacks, but it was not quite Edward R. Murrow in London as the V-bombs fell...
...it was not a war zone...
...It was no longer necessary to forbid reporters from talking to them...
...They are embarrassed by colleagues who sweat...
...and Mrs...
...Despite the few pictures of combat made available, the image persists that the Gulf War was the first we watched as it happened...
...Well, they don't consider themselves The Press...
...They are 70 individuals with 70 bosses, each of whom demands the news be covered his way, for his audience—in his language...
...It makes more sense than the reactions of the journalists who joined the critical chorus...
...conjured up out of genocide...
...And yet, indisputably, American generals found life in the Gulf War easier than in the Vietnam War, and would have even if it had lasted years, with many casualties...
...They told them what they wanted them to know, and prevented them from finding out anything else...
...Or, perhaps someone in the Pentagon, knowing from the polls how much Americans dislike the press, decided it would be neat—and to the military's advantage—if the reporters could be shown to have spoiled a humanitarian mission...
...Scud attack aftermaths in Tel Aviv and Riyadh...
...Jonathan Yardley, book critic for the Washington Post, wrote a column that can only be described as bitchy...
...All over the world this is how the landing was perceived...
...The story they left behind was back in the hands of reporters and camera crews who had been doing the job all along and knew the turf—the ones who had given up their best interviews to the visiting stars...
...Why should some Frenchman or Japanese heed a Pentagon request that he heard of, if at all, second-hand...
...Like the solution to a good mystery novel, the preceding speculations help to explain the unexplainable...
...these soldiers could be ordered not to talk to reporters...
...Some tried and were arrested...
...But, call them The Press and proclaim that they exposed the noble young men of our mercy mission to danger and you have your next battle won...
...The only battle covered and reported within a reasonable time of its occurrence was the one early on in a border town called Khafji...
...and reporters speaking into hand microphones, the way their predecessors did covering World War II for radio...
...no battle pictures were transmitted live...
...Otherwise, George Bush would never have sent in the Marines...
...Whatever was said at the time, neither the military nor anyone else could have been surprised by the presence of journalists and television cameras in Mogadishu...
...he described Mogadishu as a "show...
...There were others...
...His avuncular tone seemed so perfect, chiding yet affectionate, the image he used so homey: We all know it isn't a real war, fellows, but shucks...
...You miss all the touchdowns...
...As for wading ashore into cameras, no one complained when MacArthur did it...
...In Saigon each afternoon, a briefing officer would tell the press about the day's action, and too often a sweaty correspondent just back from the front would say that was not what he had seen...
...Although current technology allows instantaneous transmission of pictures and sound from almost anywhere with relatively little difficulty or effort—compared, that is, with what it used to take...
...After Vietnam, Margaret Thatcher won the Falklands War while keeping reporters offshore or in London...
...Ever since, the American military has dealt differently with the American press...
...Was that why, in the Gulf War, no correspondents were allowed to watch the fighting...
...Somalia is not a U.S...
...They forget for whom the bell tolls...
...The troops were there because the reporters were there, not the other way around...
...That might reduce some of the nagging about the way newspeople were kept away from the news during the Gulf War, and justify imposing the same restrictions the next time there was real combat with a real enemy...
...In other words, the whole point might have been to make sure that whenever young Americans are sent in harm's way carrying the flag, the news coverage rules would be those of the Gulf War, the only American war in which all the heroes were generals...
...it was not conquered...
...About half of the greeters were not from American newspapers or television networks...
...Too conspiratorial...
...The lieutenants and captains of Vietnam became the colonels in the Gulf and Somalia, the majors and colonels became the generals...
...On the second night of the American military presence in Somalia, with the anchormen still in situ, wearing their overwork like a badge, the spotlight had been stolen away by the separation of Mr...
...But now the stuff they were already reporting had been certified to the American public by famous faces...
...Explaining a repugnant situation or a nasty event by postulating intrigue is a sign of an immature mind...
...In the Gulf War, they kept the reporters in Riyadh and briefed them, or aboard aircraft carriers at sea...
...Complicated and vaunted pooling arrangements were botched or sabotaged, and taped pictures of the famous "Hail Mary" end run around the Iraqi west flank were lost in transit until no longer newsworthy...
...Or was it because in the Gulf there were no draftees, there was no "citizen army," only professionals...
...Later, as the Marines took the situation well in hand, there were more pictures of them on the tube and fewer of children dying...
...The images of the Somalia famine that will resonate in recollection after others fade are probably those from the night of December 8. That's when armed, warpainted Navy seals waded onto the Mogadishu beach into the lights, cameras and notebooks of the journalists, who blinded out the troops' expensive night-vision glasses, exposed them to potential sniper fire and turned a heroic occasion to farce...
...No wonder the Pentagon encouraged the impression that the Gulf War was the long prophesied combat covered live, seen in your home as it was taking place...
...Actually, almost no battles were covered at all, live or on tape or on film or by reporters with notebooks...
...He said the Pentagon had staged the landing for the benefit of the press...
...Wales, 11 years after they were married in Westminster Abbey in the most glamorous wedding in TV history...
...That would mean there was a plan to have it look like the usual communications foul-up: First the military would tell the reporters the precise location of the landing down to the best spots for cameras...
...Defense Department spokesperson Pete Williams protested: "When you cover a football game, you know you don't put your crews out there in the middle of the 50-yard line even though that might be the best place to watch...
...The sole genuine live camera coverage was CNN's from Baghdad, and the military's whispering campaign quickly labeled that subversive, a conduit for Saddam Hussein's propaganda...
...Jeff Greenfield of ABC, the only one I heard or read supporting the idea that Mogadishu was an entrapment of the press by the Pentagon "to show the chaos of unrestricted news coverage," added magisterially: "If there had been such a plot, the press' behavior made it work to perfection...
...he criticized what the anchormen wore...
...On Television HITTING THE BEACH IN MOGADISHU BY REUVEN FRANK The tumult and the shouting had not yet died, nor the Captains and the Kings departed, when the anchormen went home from Mogadishu...
...It involved Saudi troops who were or were not defeated and did or did not have American help...
...In this, the military had all the popular support an institution presumably needs in a free society...
...They brought them to the action in Grenada after it was over and took them to the wrong place in Panama...
...colony...
...Similarly, the persisting image from Somalia is almost sure to be those seals wading ashore at Mogadishu to be met by reporters, some using battery-powered lights to make TV pictures...
...As they bid the anchormen farewell, the reporters hoped they might get on the nightly news more often...
...His esthetics were outraged...
...As with any good mystery, one also must ask, cui bono...
...It's not how things happen...
...Why didn't the press stay on the sidelines...
...In any case, wouldn't the majors and colonels and generals agree that, by golly, this is more like it, and do what they could to keep it that way...
...then, on schedule, somebody would decide this was not very smart, but the word to move to the sidelines would get to the reporters too late...
...the public doesn't like the press either...
...Or maybe the new pattern is part of the "legacy of Vietnam...
...This was one of history's great hoaxes...
...What we saw "live" was generals in briefing rooms telling what happened the day before...
...The majority of them, including the Americans, had not only been in Somalia for quite some time, they had been living precariously, sleeping fitfully, eating poorly, and fighting the nitpickers back home—who knew them well...
...Furthermore, the middle of the 50-yard line is a lousy place for football pictures...
...And the Pentagon will no doubt cite it in seeking popular support for news restrictions in its next mini-war...
...Nevertheless, the situation invites speculation as to whether a detachment of seals in full kit stumbling into a typically inchoate and disorganized mob of more than 70 news people was not intended from the start to be exactly what it turned out to be...
...They had been showing the starvation and clan warfare in Somalia for months...
...Those were rehearsals...
...CNN's vice president for news, Ed Turner, said he thought it was "wrong to turn on those portable lights...
...They remember reporters roaming battlefields freely, speaking unhindered to unhappy draftees and recording their answers in notebooks, on tape or on film...
...It was not to be...
...They saw no reason to take orders...
...Many of the Washington press would rather be Washington than press...
...Thus spoke the voice of someone who doesn't cover news in the field...
...Somehow, as an explanation for the official fuss, this makes sense...
Vol. 76 • January 1993 • No. 1
