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Combat Coverage: The Press at War
-Lauren Passalacqua, October 3, 2007
War aggravates the averse relationship between the U.S. military and news media. A recent meeting of the National Council of Editorial Writers discussed officials’ distrust of reporters. It is worth placing this antagonism in a historical context to understand its effect on the news.
The escalation of the Vietnam War coincided with the rise of television ownership in the United States. When President Johnson deployed ground troops in 1965, 92 percent of all U.S. households had a TV. The format revolutionized perceptions of war. Though media scholars contend that typical reports limited violent scenes, atypical coverage affirmed emerging skepticism. Vietnam exceeded the public’s expectations for the number of lives lost and money spent. Annual Gallup polls document the decline of U.S. support for Vietnam; by 1973, 60 percent of those surveyed felt the intervention was a mistake.
Observers debate the influence of war reports on public opinion. Some argue that they generated distrust, while others posit that media merely followed the tide of change. Nonetheless, the military correlated pessimistic news with change in Americans’ view of Vietnam. The “Vietnam effect” refers to the military’s management of media to avoid another public relations coup.
The press policy during the Gulf War (1990-1991) provides a salient example of the “Vietnam effect.” U.S. Central Command devised a strategy for news collection and dissemination. The pool system structured media operations in the field. The military arranged for transportation, supplies, and escorts, fulfilling directives to monitor journalists.
Analysts interpret press pools differently. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Kenneth Bacon emphasized their intention to “get people into war zones quickly so that they’d be there at the very beginning.” Still, reporters felt pools’ prevalence severely inhibited independent journalism. The pool system confined access to approved sets of sources and topics; it standardized monitoring through military escorts.
Many journalists considered this management detrimental to a free press and sought to amend the restrictions. When the Gulf War ended, news media and military negotiations produced the Principles for News Media Coverage of the Department of Defense Operations. The military committed to “open and independent reporting;” it vowed to reduce the reliance on pool reporting and set standards for access and noninterference.
In 2003, as America prepared to invade Iraq, journalists implored the military to uphold coverage guidelines. News organizations issued a Statement of Principles, requesting that the government “embed reporters in combat situations with troops … [as] a viable alternative to pool coverage of conflicts.” In February 2003, the Department of Defense granted the press “long-term, minimally restrictive access to U.S. air, ground and naval forces through embedding.” Approximately 600 formal embeds reported to Americans from the frontlines (McChesney and Scott 431).
Reviews of the embed system vary with the reviewer. Robert Jensen argues that embeds are no more independent than those in the press pool. Relationships shape their reports; they are hesitant to criticize policies and remain subject to restrictions (McChesney and Scott 430-5).
Others counter that embedding delivers critical resources. Christopher Allbritton, an independent blogger turned TIME Magazine freelancer, offers a pointed assessment from both his unilateral (without military approval) to affiliated reporting experiences:
I'm a big fan of the embedding, as it allows me access to a side of the story I wouldn't normally get, but it does have its limitations … No organization with a PR department is going to make the in-house grumblers available. As a journalist, you have a responsibility to go around the PR folks … That's just part of your job. It's not ‘censorship.’ And again, covering the military is like covering a big company (Allbritton).
The distinct agendas of both the military and media ensure that this tension between agent and monitor will continue. As Allbritton confirms, it’s “just part of the job.”
Work Cited
Allbritton, Christopher. Email Interview. 1, October 2007.
McChesney, Robert W. and Ben Scott. Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. New York: New York Press, 2004.
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