[Reader-list] In Bed With the Pentagon

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Nation
February 27, 2003

In Bed With the Pentagon

by Carol Brightman

It's a fascinating scheme, "this very ambitious and aggressive embed 
plan," as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs 
Bryan Whitman calls it. But "embedding" journalists in selected 
military units is only part of the Pentagon's program for handling 
news organizations in the event of war in Iraq. More significant is 
the extraordinary reach of Pentagon planning. For months officials 
have been scanning the media--electronic and print, domestic and 
international--calculating markets and circulations and blending news 
shows with entertainment divisions to cover all fronts in a wartime 
media campaign as audacious as any ever attempted.

Not just the American press but global media will be shaped by the 
Pentagon's deployment of reporters, photographers and TV crews in and 
out of the war zone. Of more than 500 journalists in the program, 
around 100 are from foreign news organizations, including Al Jazeera. 
Only Americans, 238 of them, have trained at media boot camps for 
slots inside military units (although such training is not a 
prerequisite). Other journalists will transmit their "products" from 
the Pentagon or foreign capitals, or "in theater" via mobile press 
pools and CPICs (combined press information centers).

Instead of shutting the press out of the battle over public opinion, 
as the military did in the Gulf War and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has 
decided to enlist the media's vast resources. Some of its reasons are 
innocent enough, like CNN military analyst Gen. Wesley Clark's regret 
that censorship during the Gulf War kept the press from documenting 
"a First Armored Division tank battle that was just incredible, 
perhaps the biggest armored battle ever." Other motives are murkier. 
According to potential "embed" Dave Moniz of USA Today, "What is 
driving this [plan] is the fear that Iraq will win the propaganda war 
if reporters are not on the ground with troops." The Pentagon may 
hope to muffle the impact of substantial civilian casualties from the 
"shock and awe" attacks of US bombers, or from infantry assaults on 
Baghdad itself with the nightly adventures on ABC or CBS of your 
favorite platoon at war.

"On the ground with troops" would be far from the scene of 
carnage--on the deck of an aircraft carrier maybe, or at Camp Doha in 
Kuwait. Reporters won't be free to follow the action on their own but 
must travel whenever and wherever the Pentagon directs them. Even 
Whitman admits a "cost" to embedding, which is "that you get a very 
narrow view of what's going on." The advantage, he told Washington 
bureau chiefs at a recent meeting, is "you get extremely deep, rich 
coverage of what's going on in a particular unit." But he reminded 
them that "you will not have an embed opportunity with every ground 
unit [or] at every airfield location [or] on every major carrier 
battle group." Reporting from CPICs or the Pentagon may fill the 
gaps. And news groups can pool their "feeds" to make a story, but the 
whole is drawn from parts the military has preselected for coverage.

The Pentagon proposes, the press disposes--albeit within softer 
confines than prevailed in the Gulf War. Under then-Defense Secretary 
Dick Cheney and Army Gen. Colin Powell, media were confined to a 
national press pool and ordered to submit all copy, photographs and 
film to military censors. Most TV footage was supplied by military 
crews. High-level briefings were orchestrated by Cheney and Powell 
themselves because, as Cheney later told an interviewer from the 
Freedom Forum, "The information function was extraordinarily 
important. I did not have a lot of confidence I could leave that to 
the press."

As a result, according to Patrick Sloyan, who won a Pulitzer Prize 
for his war coverage for Newsday, pool reporters didn't produce a 
single eyewitness account of the clash between allied and Iraqi 
troops. Nor did images of dead bodies find their way into US media. 
By the time the press was taken to a battle scene, the Iraqi bodies 
were gone; buried in one case by giant plows mounted on Abrams battle 
tanks, followed by armored combat earth-movers that leveled the 
ground. "I don't mean to be flippant," said Whitman's Pentagon 
predecessor, Pete Williams, of that event, "but there's no nice way 
to kill somebody in war." (Williams is now a Washington correspondent 
for NBC.)

In this war, journalists will carry their own transmission devices, 
but their use will depend on field commanders' approval. Pentagon 
rules of engagement dictate strict prohibitions on reporting live or 
continuing actions, as well as future or postponed operations. Dates, 
times and places can be described only in general terms.

Not the facts, ma'am, but the feel--which is likely to be warm, a bit 
fuzzy, funny too, befitting the chronicles of a unit scribe. But any 
story or photograph can be squashed on the same grounds used in that 
other war: for operational security, success of the mission and the 
safety of the people involved. Plus ça change...