ON TELEVISION
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television The Generals and the Journalists By Reuven Frank Inside every war there is another war, between the generals and the journalists. At stake is who gets to inform the American...
...Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying in the hotel at the time...
...The falsehoods have not been traced to their origin, but at a time when the militaryneededaheroine, it foun done...
...In the case of embedded television reporters, that view misses the point...
...New principles are promulgated and new doctrines established...
...That was the context...
...He was modestly feted and offered a book contract, then he dropped from sight...
...For the Pentagon at least, embedding has been a 10-strike...
...A British reporter wrote that the U. S. forces had advanced too far for their supplies to keep pace, and the Marines with whom he was embedded were getting only one MRE (meals ready to eat) a day...
...It was the top brass at home who saw bad news as subversive...
...The military learned in Afghanistan that the cruder forms of censorship and information control had been leapfrogged by technology...
...They would probably be astonished to read what Ron Steinman, the NBC News Saigon bureau chief for several years, recalls in A Saigon Diary: Inside Television's First War...
...A member of the White House staff and a Pentagon staffer, who also happened to be in the hotel at the time, supported him...
...conditions have to be perfect, and you must pay close attention...
...After "major combat" was said to have ended in Iraq, Ms...
...Her capture occurred at a particularly bad time for the generals...
...The military campaign was proceeding swiftly, and according to plan...
...She had been badly wounded, firing her rifle until it jammed, then telling her captors, "I am an American soldier...
...The reporter and his cameraman then covered the event: the devastation, the noise, the wounded being trundled outside on stretchers Officers at the scene tried to prevent them from taking footage...
...I do not recall anything like that during the war in Vietnam...
...Reporters using videophones and portable uplinking equipment could send words, sounds and pictures from anywhere to anywhere, and no one could shut them up...
...Neither reporters nor field officers today really remember what it was like...
...It is hard to appreciate that this is the same military we have lived with from Vietnam to now...
...It is not only the generals who now quarrel with the correspondents...
...Not until the North won, and the tortured incidents of the evacuation from Saigon dominated a week of television, did the feeling emerge among some in the services that if not for the press they might have been the victors...
...Even last spring the news media and the military in Iraq did not come close to the cordial dealings that marked the middle three years of the Vietnam War described by Steinman...
...With conditions in Iraq reverting to the level of fullscale combat, tensions can only become worse...
...Things kept going that way, to the distress of Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, a tall, handsome, African-American officer who regularly briefed the press corps covering the war from U.S...
...The United States Army calls them the "Zone of the Interior"—the taxpayers, voters, parents, and sweethearts back home...
...And no one knew how it would come out...
...Divining Pentagon press policy is like reading tea leaves...
...Live...
...But nothing in American military history compares to the introspection that followed Vietnam, and it appears that one of the lessons concerning the press called for a tightening of the reins...
...Recently she has been helping out here and there, because the old hostility has seeped back as the press covers what it judges to be news, not what the generals ordered...
...newspapers and networks have gone out of their way to find "positive" stories, while denying that they are susceptible to the Pentagon's prodding...
...The florid English translation...
...with his family...
...defeat is classified...
...All Quiet on the Western Front, misses the point...
...In the Gulf War, for example, filming footage of combat was restricted to a pool cameraman supposedly serving all the networks...
...The Iraqi physician who led the Special Forces to Lynch's bedside has been brought to the U.S...
...Early in the Vietnam conflict, Secretary of State Dean Rusk turned to one reporter and demanded angrily, "What side are you on...
...Endless argument has raged about the Pentagon's decision, with this war, to "embed" reporters among the troops, and have them live, eat, sleep, and endure combat conditions alongside the fighting forces...
...That generals and journalists have disparate functions and follow different rules is a fairly novel idea in the history of human conflict...
...And no pictures of body bags...
...troops crossed into Iraq with reporters in tow, it almost seemed that a generation of hostility and mistrust, forged in Vietnam, had ended...
...Every newspaper front page in the world displayed a picture of his shaggy beard, courtesy of the Department of Defense...
...occupation authority told the Post, "Instead of rendering or summoning aid, they focused on gathering video footage of people in agonizingly painful situations—in order to boost the ratings...
...From the Pentagon to the fighting fronts, generals on active duty were annoyed that a platoon of retired generals was secondguessing them on every television channel...
...Even covering "positive" stories, they say, usually requires a minder from the occupation authority...
...Embedding reporters was an idea kicking around the Pentagon for decades...
...Eleven of the soldiers in the truck were killed, and two of the five captured were severely injured...
...This was assumed to be our due__ A call from MACV, Military Assistance Command Vietnam, to Tan Son Nhut [airbase] often would be enough to get our crew on a plane or helicopter to the battlefront...
...Good news...
...They helped significantly in getting our [camera] crews around the country on military transportation...
...An official of the U.S...
...Day-to-day relations between generals andjournalists remain tempestuous...
...Ernie Pyle's reports were not the definitive history of World War II...
...Miklaszewski's first impulse, he told the Washington Post, was to find out whether Wolfowitz had been injured...
...We can all recite how a truck carrying military supply technicians made a wrong turn and was ambushed on March 23, with the war barely a week old...
...At stake is who gets to inform the American people, whose take on the truth will reach the ultimate judges...
...The advance was so rapid, it noted, that there were no troops to protect the flanks, which were under constant harassment from guerrillas...
...The Washington Post ran a particularly dramatic and uplifting account...
...But that has always been the case...
...She became an instant heroine...
...There has been an improvement over the news blackout in Panama, obfuscation in Grenada, and attempted choreography in the Gulf War...
...Whatever the reporter says, all that really matters is what the public sees...
...The move has been widely second-guessed...
...civilian and military memories ofthat chapter are secondhand...
...Yet the policy of attaching the press to the troops simply recognized reality...
...Those things have actually been reported extensively...
...American intelligence withheld almost nothing...
...When Winston Churchill sent dispatches from the Boer War to his London newspaper, he was a serving cavalry officer...
...An efficient military, though, follows every field exercise, every skirmish, every war whether won or lost, with careful, organized examination to see what can be learned...
...headquarters in neighboring Qatar...
...What would be the war's most devastatingpictures, bodies delivered from Iraq to the Air Force base in Dover, Delaware, are forbidden: No flag-wrapped coffins carried slowly out of transport planes and laidneatly on the tarmac...
...She had been a "good soldier" in every sense of the term, but yet not quite a heroine...
...Until recently, the public at home depended mostly on the military's official communiqués...
...Lynch and the doctor had experienced the new media, and the new fame—which is just as fleeting as the old version...
...As U.S...
...The other criticism, that every embeddedjournalist's report, print or broadcast, represents only a small part of the war, is true enough...
...As they were leaving, members of Brooks' staff told some of the journalists, confidentially, that big news was about to break...
...More to the point, it perpetrated a hoax on a reporter, a newspaper, and the public...
...Whenever I visited the NBC News office at the rickety old Eden building in Saigon, I myself was struck by a mimeographed sheet on the bulletin board listing the departure times of military flights to Danang, Hué or the Delta...
...That part of the story took weeks to dribble out...
...But, if anything, conditions correspond to the end of that struggle, when the captains and majors who are now the colonels and generals, grew testy with the journalists...
...The tussle between the press and the military is in some respects back to where it was in the Vietnam era...
...But when Saddam Hussein's statue hit the ground with a thud so did relations between the Pentagon and the Fourth Estate...
...Behind closed doors, they filled me in on continuing battles, battles that were due to start, troop movements and unreported squabbles between the South Vietnamese military and their American counterparts...
...Americans in their living rooms have seen the look, the feel and the sound of combat...
...at least one book deal was signed, and another for a TV movie...
...Clarke left the Pentagon to focus on her family life...
...His first, and most critical, batch of pictures was said to have been "lost" and did not reach the reporters who needed them until long after the action...
...Opposition was always too great...
...Next year newer technologies will refine the system and allow reporters even more flexibility...
...When a battle went badly and American troops suffered a deadly ambush, the military was not reluctant to get us to the scene...
...Like children trying to hide their excitement and anticipation, the reporters stuck around...
...But Vietnam happened more than a generation ago...
...But something of a climax was reached October 26 when Iraqi insurgents or resistance fighters or terrorists—take your pick—shelled Baghdad's al-Rashid Hotel, favored by most American administrators andjoumalists...
...Agents and publishers descended on the humble family homestead...
...So, coincidentally, was NBC's Pentagon correspondent, Jim Miklaszewski, and his cameraman...
...Other newspapers followed suit...
...The fortunes of war, and the bickering, involve the highest echelons of government...
...Herodotus described the Persian Wars long after they were over...
...But to understand why, her oft retold and ultimately deconstructed story needs to be placed in proper context...
...The prospect of retribution for those who strayed was left hanging in the air...
...They were subsumed into the two-dimensional world of public relations, where real people become ciphers once their stories have been planted and their clippings pasted in the book...
...She had not fired her rifle...
...It is a sign of how bad things have gotten when an experienced and respected reporter is accused of having Nielsen ratings on his mind while covering a fatal attack on the hotel where he himself was staying...
...It is hard to dispute well-documented ambushes and fatalities, but the Pentagon and its field commanders would prefer to see more stories about schools opening, businesses flourishing, or the local press publishing freely...
...One of those hurt was Private Lynch, 19, attractive, from a small town in West Virginia...
...They would arrange to have us ferried to the battlefront to cover the start of a sizable action...
...Each side needs the other, but neither side trusts the other...
...Many officials high up in the Pentagon still dislike the program...
...The coldness and insufficiency of these bulletins were satirized in the original title of one of the 20th century's seminal novels, Im Westen, Nichts Neues...
...It shortly turned out that Private Lynch, though badly hurt in the truck accident, had not been shot...
...Miklaszewski insisted he was doing his job as a journalist...
...We learn about Julius Caesar's exploits from his blatantly self-aggrandizing missives to the Roman Senate...
...But with the Iraq preemption in the offing, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria ("Torie") Clarke convinced the top brass, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, that it was worth trying...
...On April 2, Brooks went through his scheduled briefing and slid past some of the more irritating questions...
...The press, though, was full of disturbing details...
...Well into the small hours, the news arrived...
...Her treatment in the Iraqi hospital by Iraqi doctors and staff had been professional and considerate, although the rescue party could not have known that until they got to her...
...the military has gained more sympathy from its employers, the American public, than ever before because for the first time citizens have gotten a palpable sense of soldiers in battle...
...Almost every television outlet in the world had a copy of the videotape of an Army doctor checking his beard for vermin and examining his teeth as one would a horse up for auction...
...This was part of the open coverage we enjoyed during the war...
...But a British press officer told Miklaszewski, "I swear to God if you do not take the tape out of the camera I am going to kill you...
...With Private Lynch still recovering in the Army hospital near Frankfurt, Germany, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer competed for the TV interview...
...He was not...
...A reporter could call military transportation and book himself and his crew on one of those flights, no questions asked...
...A Special Forces team had rescued Lynch from the hospital...
...On December 13, when Saddam Hussein was dug out of his spider-hole, the Fourth Infantry Division had photographers and video cameramen along...
...it was discussed in informal conversations, and examined by task forces and special committees...
...Some opponents contend that the "co-opted" journalists identify too closely with the grunts in their platoon...
...It wasn't always so...
...During the Vietnam War, however, on the ground the military and press were for the most part personally friendly and professionally parallel...
...Since the incident with Jim Miklaszewski, correspondents returning from Iraq have been telling the New York Obsen'er about how they were barred from hospitals, morgues, and police stations...
...From the military's perspective, American journalists in Iraq have been obsessed with negative developments and have ignored positive ones...
...Though at times the public affairs office desperately wanted us to cover only victories, mop-up operations, and other actions that put the United States in a favorable light, we usually had the freedom to go anywhere...
...The current state of affairs is perhaps best reflected in the most celebrated event of the Iraq war to date—the capture and release of Private First Class Jessica Lynch...
...The briefing officers for the Army, Marines, Air Force and Navy were excellent sources of detailed information that went beyond the open sessions...
...But affirming tales are not as powerful as images of downed helicopters, rocketpropelled grenade attacks, or the near daily litany of American casualties...
...President John F. Kennedy, who liked to coin old Chinese proverbs, said after the Bay of Pigs fiasco that victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan...
...During the invasion of Iraq, Ari Fleischer, still the spokesman for President George W Bush, warned journalists to be careful what they wrote...
...In Iraq today, victory has a hundred press officers...
Vol. 87 • January 2004 • No. 1
