Military-press reconciliation

WASHINGTON - The Vietnam era marked a low point in trust between the government and the news media. What reporters saw on the ground sharply contradicted what they were being told, and the resulting credibility gap poisoned the relationship between the press and the Pentagon for decades.

       That schism has now been mostly healed, at least for the time being, thanks to the introduction of "embeds" - reporters stationed with military units. The American press was part of the team during the invasion of Iraq, experiencing the same hardships and bond­ing with the soldiers they were covering. Their dispatches were almost uniformly positive from the military's standpoint, and reporters came away happy because they had access, the coin of the realm in journalism.

       Critics pointed out that the coverage was often too narrow and cheerleading, given each reporter's limited range, but both sides - Pentagon and the press - agreed that the embeds were a positive evolution in

reporting a war. Even the most battle-hardened mili­tary types have come to realize the importance of ral­lying public support. Winning over the media is a necessary prelude to waging a successful war.

When the Vietnam War began, there were no bar­riers to the media, and hundreds of reporters were in the country on any given day during the height of the conflict. When the news they produced was not favorable from the administration's standpoint, and the television footage of the death and dying turned Americans against the war, the Pentagon concluded that the only good media was a controlled media.

To this day, there are officials inside and outside the Pentagon who blame the U.S. loss in Vietnam on the news industry. By airing reports on the horror of wag­ing war against a population, where you can't distin­guish innocent civilians from combatants, the media created a climate in which the military felt constrained from doing its job, creating the conditions for defeat. The other side of the argument is that Vietnam was never winnable, and the media in its imperfect and often messy search for the truth did what it was sup­posed to do, go beyond the press release and tell the story of what was really happening.

After Vietnam, the generals vowed there would never be another living-room war. When President Reagan ordered an invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983, reporters were held for two days on a neighboring Caribbean island until the conflict was over. The news media made enough noise about the abridgement of their First Amendment rights that the military put in place a "pool" system, where a small number of reporters are given access and share the informa­tion with their colleagues.

The pool system was activat­ed during the first Gulf War, but _the military exercised such tight control over access that most Americans experienced the war as though it were a sterile arcade game. The invasion of Iraq was a breakthrough in press relations, and it happened against the backdrop of a newly invigorated volun­teer army, and a string of military successes, from Desert One to Kosovo. The military had regained its place as one of America's most highly respected institutions.

Simultaneously, the military and the press have reconciled, a fact epitomized in Wesley Clark, a four­-star general who, upon retirement, became a news commentator for CNN. Now a democratic presiden­tial contender, Clark represents a fusion of military, press and politics. Whether he wins or loses, the rec­onciliation will remain - until someone comes along and foolishly creates another military-press schism.

(c) 2003 Anderson and Cohn

 

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