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The role of the press (in the GWOT). Lessons of war past. Brookings/Harvard Forum

A Brookings/Harvard Forum
The Role of the Press: Lessons of Wars Past

Hosted by:
STEPHEN HESS
Senior Fellow, Governmental Studies, The Brookings Institution, author of numerous books on media and politics

MARVIN KALB
Executive Director, The Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government; former Chief Diplomatic Correspondent for CBS News and NBC News and former moderator of NBC's Meet the Press

Panel will include:
PETER ARNETT
Chief International Correspondent,

; author of Live from the Battlefield; pioneer AP war correspondent in Vietnam and CNN correspondent during the Gulf War and other conflicts

STANLEY KARNOW
Author of Vietnam: A History; former correspondent for Life, Time, Washington Post, and NBC News, among others

TED KOPPEL
Anchor and Managing Editor, ABC's Nightline

DANIEL SCHORR
Senior News Analyst, National Public Radio; Veteran reporter covering major stories for more than six decades including World War II

BARRY ZORTHIAN
Partner, Alcalde & Fay; former Vice President of Time, Inc.; spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Saigon during the Vietnam war

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The Role of the Press in the Anti-Terrorism Campaign: A weekly discussion series on news media issues growing out of the current anti-terrorism campaign
project home page

Wednesday, October 31, 2001
2:00pm-3:30pm
The Brookings Institution
Event Information

MR. MIKE ARMACOST: Welcome everybody. I'm Mike Armacost. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this Harvard/Brookings Forum, "The Role of the Press

As we all know, terrorists have dragged this into a war. Some call it a campaign. Whatever we call it - I prefer to call it a war - we know it's unusually complex both to wage and to report. We're fighting in a moment in a country from which large numbers of journalists are excluded. We know that while bombs are falling and we can hear or see the reverberations of that, this is a struggle in which intelligence and police work will be quite prominent and those are especially difficult to report on. The identity of our foes is pretty elusive. They're not making it easy to report on them. A lot of the pictures we see show up on Al Jazeera first.

And this is a struggle at home. We've discovered our own vulnerability at home and away we've probably not had to worry about much since the War of 1812. That's presenting its own peculiar challenges. We know that the terrorists, whether they're trying to kill Americans with the anthrax, they're certainly succeeding in spreading a good deal of anxiety and apprehension and how one reports on those things is a novel challenge.

So we felt it was useful to engage distinguished journalists on some of the contemporary challenges facing the media as they report on contemporary events.

We are particularly fortunate to have here, next door, two people who have made it their careers to have a deep knowledge of the relationship between media and government, Steve Hess from his perch at Brookings for nearly 30 years. He is coming to this institution after serving in the government during the Nixon Administration. And Marvin Kalb, of course, now Executive Director of The Shorenstein Center at Harvard, but a man with a very distinguished career as a working journalist as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent for CBS and NBC and a long time moderator of Meet the Press.

As you can see from the panel, those of you my age, it takes us back to an era when we watched the anguish of the Vietnam War unfold through the eyes of those on the panel. And they not only distinguished themselves at that point but have had prominent roles in public life ever since. So confronting these issues I'm sure with this distinguished cast will not only be illuminating but should be lots of fun.

Therefore, without further ado let me invite Steve and Marvin to make a few comments before opening it up to the panel.

MR. STEPHEN HESS: Thank you, Mike.

Marvin and I are really quite pleased that you would come. If Mike introduced every seminar here at Brookings he'd have nothing else to do, so we're honored that you picked ours.

It's an unusual exercise for Brookings, and I thought I'd tell you a little of the history. Actually, about a month ago Mike called me and said that one of our trustees, Jim Lynn, had said we're about to be in a situation in which it's going to be confusing and complicated and very important, the relationship between government and the press, and shouldn't Brookings try to be helpful. Mike called me and I said, it sounds good, I'll check around to other think tanks and see what's going on.

I called Marvin, because it's an absolute natural for The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy of the Kennedy School at Harvard, and he is now the Executive Director of the Washington office right next door, after having been the Founding Director of the institution in Cambridge. He was as enthusiastic about the idea as I was, and so we started to plan a day conference, and we started to put together our ideas of panels on the military, on the diplomatic, on public information and so forth.

Then it suddenly struck us that this was not a question and an issue like pinning a butterfly to a cork board and coming back and looking at it and it would never change. It was going to be something that was going to be constantly in motion and flux and the logical way for us to handle it would be to have a weekly session, conversation, with journalists and other participants. This is a totally new idea for Brookings. We don't usually carry these things through week after week as we're planning to do in this way, and of course we're very pleased that Brookings and Harvard joined together to allow us to do this.

We're very grateful of course, because a lot of the hand and glove work will be done by Ron Nessen and his staff in the Office of Communications. Ron, of course, we expect to be very much involved in this process as a participant as we go along since obviously he's been both a war correspondent and a presidential press secretary, so we're pleased about that.

There are a couple of announcements that you always make in these events. This is being web-cast on the Internet, so we're providing live streaming audio and video of the event to users who click where indicated on the main Brookings web page, home page, which is

. Then the full video of this event will be archived on the Brookings web site so that you can always come back to it at any future time, along with very soon the full transcript also posted on the Brookings web site. We're very pleased that C-Span is with us. It's to be taped, so there can't be questions from the C-Span audience, but there can be questions from our streaming video audience if they will choose to dial in, e-mail us a question at

.

We have an unusual panel because we can literally go from A to Z, so let me talk about our guests for a couple of minutes in alphabetical order.

Peter Arnett. There's a special breed of war correspondents. Not military correspondents, not diplomatic correspondents - war correspondents - and we think of them almost uniquely one per war. Whether it's Stephen Crane for the Civil War or Richard Harding Davis for the Spanish American War, Ernie Pyle for World War II, and I think possibly the name that will be remembered in the same way for Vietnam and then subsequently for the Gulf War is Peter Arnett.

Working for the AP, he earned in Vietnam a Pulitzer in 1966. We probably, certainly the younger ones here in the audience remember him even more for those days, that morning on, what would it be, January 16th or 17th, 1991 where he with his colleagues from CNN, Bernie Shaw and John Holloman, told us everything that we had any access to from Baghdad as American bombs were falling. And then subsequently was the only American reporter in Baghdad for awhile and became increasingly controversial.

When you think of Peter you also remember a group in Saigon in the 1960s that got to be known collectively as the "boys of Saigon." And they were David Halberstam of the New York Times, Neil Sheehan of UPI, and Stanley Karnow of Time Magazine.

It's interesting when we think back that this group of half a dozen or so virtually changed the course of modern journalism. Stanley, too, has a Pulitzer Prize. I should say, Pulitzer Prizes in journalism are very special, but Stanley's is in history and that is very unique. They only give one a year. He won his Pulitzer Prize for his book on the American empire in the Philippines. He's also very well known for his best seller on Vietnam, which then became a very popular PBS series.

I turn to Ted Koppel. With Ted all you probably have to say is he's Ted Koppel who founded, is the host, and is the Managing Editor of ABC's Nightline. He certainly was America's life line during the Iranian hostage crisis. He's won 37 Emmy's, etc., etc., etc.

I will tell you one other thing that you may not know quite as well about Ted Koppel. That is in the days when he was a diplomatic correspondent for ABC; Marvin Kalb the diplomatic correspondent for CBS - they had the task of following Henry Kissinger around on his shuttle diplomacy, many hours on those planes. They decided to write a novel together, and indeed, two of our panelists are novelists who wrote a novel called "In the National Interest," to show how broad-based they are.

Moving along alphabetically we have Daniel Schorr who is now the Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio, as virtually everybody should know. He is the last working journalist of Ed Murrow's legendary CBS team that he put together that is so famous.

What can we say about Dan Schorr except if it's ever an important event you expect him to be covering it. If he's not covering it, it can't be an important event. He's been the fellow who somehow was in the middle of the McCarthy hearings. He was arrested, at least briefly, and thrown out of the Soviet Union when indeed that was a badge of honor. He was there at the building of the Berlin Wall. He was on Nixon's enemies list, how about that. And he even has been the cause of an investigation by the House of Representatives Ethics Committee for when he wouldn't release one of his sources and ultimately the committee decided by a vote of 6 to 5 not to cite him for contempt and throw him in jail again. That's our good friend Dan Schorr.

Barry Zorthian is a person who comes to this important subject, the lessons of wars past, from a different perspective, from the other side of the podium. From 1964 through mid-1968 he was the Chief U.S. spokesman and Director of the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office in Saigon, in Vietnam. During those years he was responsible for all of the communications including media relations and psychological warfare.

In your packet we put together a packet plus some biographies. There are also some recent articles that we thought would help expand on this subject when you get a chance to read them. The one by Barry which appeared about a week ago in the Washington Times I think is particularly instructive. I hope you'll take a look at that.

Obviously once we start this conversation you're going to see the affection that the correspondents hold for him from his days in Saigon.

I want to make one other little point that came to me as I was thinking of these folks. All of these six journalists on the platform have a child who is a journalist.

Stan Karnow's daughter is a very, very distinguished photojournalist. Peter Arnett's daughter Elsa is a national correspondent for Scripps Howard. Daniel Schorr's son -

MR. PETER ARNETT: Knight-Ridder.

MR. HESS: Ah, Knight-Ridder. We have to get that straight. Thank you.

Daniel Schorr's son Jonathan is particularly involved in the educational beat. Ted Koppel's daughter is probably very well known to all of us from being the CNN correspondent at the State Department. Marvin Kalb's daughter was a reporter until recently for Gannett and now is freelancing. So there's something in genes and chromosomes in this panel that I think is awfully good and awfully strong.

I'm going to turn the moderating, quite logically, over to my co-host Marvin Kalb. Only one thing I should say about him additionally that Mike didn't already say; that is he has a new book that's just out. We like to promote those things. It's called "One Scandalous Story" and the subtitle gives it away. It's called "Clinton, Lewinsky and the Thirteen Days that Tarnished American Journalism."

Since he was indeed the moderator of Meet the Press, I turn this program over to Marvin and I'll come back at the end to tell you a little about next week.

MR. MARVIN KALB: Thank you very much, Steve.

The end will be at 3:30 this afternoon. And anything that we say here on the panel is not to be ascribed to our children. They are not responsible for anything that the parents say. Not at all.

We are going to be talking about lessons learned, what lessons journalists learned from wars past. The implication being how can those lessons be applied to the current struggle against global terrorism.

I would like to start with Dan Schorr, and I would like to ask him to think back to the days of World War II. I know that Dan himself did not cover World War II, but he was there and because he has analyzed just about, as Steve said, every other major event that has happened since World War II, I would like him to think back to World War II and find, if you can Dan, what lessons could have been extracted by journalists covering that kind of a war that could perhaps be applied to today.

MR. DANIEL SCHORR: It's true. I wanted to serve as a correspondent in World War II but I had been drafted into the Army and the Army rarely gives you what you volunteer for so I ended up being in intelligence, which was a big mistake. But another story.

Let me tell you this story. On D-Day Charles Collingwood was taken to Omaha Beach to report live on CBS the invasion of Normandy. In those days to do that he had to have a 60 pound battery pack on his back which would transmit a signal for him as far as one of the ships at sea which would then boost it to London and the BBC circuit would then take it to New York and it would go on the air live and he couldn't have a return feed because there wasn't enough energy to do that.

So he was told at this precise moment you start talking and you will be heard live, and you talk for 15 minutes, then you sign off and go back to Ed Murrow in London.

I listened to the tape of this several years later. The trouble that Charles Collingwood ran into was that he was on a section of beach where there was not very much activity. Yet he had to start at a given moment. He started talking - you could see the planes overhead, ships at sea, boats are landing, so on and so forth, and you began to feel he was straining to fill time because there wasn't very much action there.

Then you heard with a little lift in his voice saying, now it's very difficult for me to give you an overall picture of what's happening here, so I see a Navy officer approaching in the distance and let me find out whether he knows something more. He talked his way up to the Navy officer and said, "Excuse me Commander, I am Charles Collingwood at CBS News. I wonder if you have any idea of what the whole picture is on this beach."

The answer to which was, "Beats the shit out of me, Charlie. I'm the NBC correspondent." (Laughter)

The reason...

MR. KALB: Relevance, relevance.

MR. SCHORR: The relevance of this is that he was in a Navy uniform. He was in an Army uniform. The NBC correspondent was in a Navy uniform. All of this betokened the fact that in World War II correspondents knew which side they were on. They didn't have to ask Dean Rusk. They knew which side they were on. They were a part of something called the war effort. They didn't have to be sent just because they submitted voluntarily to censorship. They would go and ask would it be harmful if I reported this? Would it be harmful if I reported that?

And it was important to remember that because that is an era of history where the press and the military worked closely together, being sure of the rectitude of what they were doing and why they were doing it, and that got lost somewhere. That got lost somewhere. It survived some during the Korean War, during the Vietnam War. It began to collapse when they found out that the government thought nothing about managing the news because they felt that we have to win this and it's our job to manage the news, and if we lie to you that's lying in a good cause, and managed to undermine the trust on which the relationship between the press and the military has to be if it's ever to work. And ever since that time it's been going very rapidly downhill.

MR. KALB: Dan, thank you very much.

All four of our remaining panelists can talk to us about Vietnam, but I'm going to ask Peter Arnett to talk to us about the Gulf War. But first, on the Vietnam War, Ted and Stan and then Barry.

Ted if you could start us, the lessons that in covering the Vietnam War you feel you learned and that could be applied to today.

MR. TED KOPPEL: Let me pick up where Dan Schorr left off because there is kind of an evolutionary scale here in terms of the technology and how the technology has had an impact on the way that things are covered.

When I was in Vietnam in 1967 it was just at the very beginning of satellite technology in terms of its use in journalism. Most of the time, which is to say about 98 percent of the time, we would do our stories in the field and I'm speaking now about television, and in that sense in those days Peter of course was working for the AP, and Stan was working for Time, or was it the Washington Post back then? Both, I think. So I guess I'm the only television correspondent here who covered Vietnam over an extended period of time.

We would do a story out in the field on film. We would hand the film bag to anyone who might be heading back to Saigon. In Saigon it would be met by a courier who usually would have to keep it overnight because it would arrive let's say at 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening and there wouldn't be another flight out until the next morning. Then it would be flown probably to Tokyo, from Tokyo to Los Angeles, from Los Angeles to New York where it would be picked up by a motorcycle courier. It would be taken into ABC, NBC, CBS. The film would then be processed, edited, and put on the air.

Perhaps as much as three days might elapse between the time that the story was written and the time that it got on the air. So you had to write it with that in mind. It had to be a story that could survive for at least three days. That meant that your entire focus on what you were doing changed.

And Marvin, you will guide us as to precisely where you want to go, but now I'm going to leap forward to my daughter's generation. When young people today are covering, whether it be a war or any event that is deemed worthy of live coverage, which I suppose in the era of 24 hour cable networks means anything that moves, in these days a journalist has to be prepared to go on the air instantly, around the clock.

Now that may seem like an evolutionary step forward. In point of fact, it's half a dozen evolutionary steps back, because they rarely have time to go out and do any reporting. They are almost chained to that satellite relay point, wherever they may be. These days whether it's in northern Afghanistan or whether it was back when Peter was in Iraq, he might have had a little bit of time to go out and do some reporting but knowing the way CNN operates, he'd be lucky if he could break free for half an hour.

That is one of the main things that has changed, and let me stop at that point because you'll let us know where you want to go.

MR. KALB: Thanks, Ted.

There was a story not so long ago where the White House correspondent for CNN actually, and I think rather bravely, turned to the anchor woman who was asking her a question and she said, "I don't know the answer to that question because I've been here all morning. I haven't had a chance to do any reporting." (Laughter)

Stan Karnow. Your sense of Vietnam and lessons learned.

MR. STANLEY KARNOW: Let me go back with a generalization. You remember Churchill's remark in war time - "Truth must be protected by a body guard of lies."

It seems to me the function of a reporter is to, if you pardon my name dropping, I was sitting in the Ritz Bar in Paris with Hemingway one time and he said "Every reporter needs a built-in shit detector." Right? And we have to be able to puncture these.

Let me illustrate a couple of points of how the reporter begins to learn his niche, his profession - craft, I should say. A couple of anecdotes.

About 1962 Kennedy decided to send helicopters to Vietnam, but he wanted to do it secretly. It would have been a violation of the Geneva agreement so I won't go into all those details, but I am sitting on the terrace of the Majestic Hotel in Saigon which is right on the river with an Army public affairs officer. And as we're sitting there an aircraft carrier comes around the bend of the river with its deck covered with helicopters.

I say, "Hey Joe, look at that aircraft carrier." He said, "I don't see no aircraft carrier." (Laughter)

One more. About the same time we had an agreement in Geneva to neutralize Laos, which is a place that nobody knows about anymore, but anyway it was in part of that area. All the American forces were supposed to be pulled out and all the North Vietnamese forces were supposed to be pulled out. Anyway, there was an American contingent there. From one day to the next there were no American soldiers, but there were a lot of Americans walking around in Hawaiian "aloha" shirts.

I ran into General Henches, and I said, "Hi, General." He says, "Mr. Henches."

One day we were bombing, secretly bombing Laos. And one day I went over to the American embassy because I knew the embassy was targeting the bombing, to find out where the targets were. I saw a source of mine and I said, "Listen, can you tell me what the targets are?" He looks at me and says, "Tell you what the targets are? Come on, I can't even discuss the whole question of bombing. It's completely off the record."

I said come on, everybody knows it's going on. Give me an idea of where these targets are. "I can't do that."

Finally, I wheedled and wheedled and he says, "All right." He goes to his safe, he opens it up, he takes out a copy of Newsweek with a map of the bombing targets. It's that secret. He says, "You can't take that out of the office." (Laughter)

MR. KALB: Stan, is one of the points here that you feel that...

MR. KARNOW: The point is that eventually you become skeptical. Skeptical, to put it mildly.

You have to assume Zoro - I mean Zorthian, sorry. We accept Zorthian because we all love him, and he never lied to us - at least now knowingly.

But if we projected up to now and we watch these briefings on the screen today, which is all I know about, I'm just another consumer, there's something else going on here that they're not telling us, right? How are we going to find out?

In Vietnam, and Peter is more eloquent on this than I am, there was no censorship in Vietnam. One of the lessons, by the way, that the military likes to believe they learned in Vietnam, is you can't have a war without censorship. In Vietnam, if you wanted to go on a military operation you went down to the black market in the street and you bought yourself a fatigue uniform and boots and a helmet and everything. You could even buy guns in the black market, although journalists shouldn't carry guns, and you went out to the airport, you got on a helicopter, and you went to an operation. Nobody was censoring what you wrote, the pictures were going out. Koppel, Ted is right. Actually, you really weren't journalists in those days you were historians. It was taking three days to get on the air.

MR. KALB: My question to you is, are you meaning to say that when journalists go out to cover something now, are they supposed to look back upon the experience of Vietnam and say that the government is lying to me?

MR. KARNOW: They're supposed to start off on the proposition that they're not being told the truth, or they're being spoon fed. That starts with the Gulf War. It started earlier. It started with Grenada, it started with Panama.

MR. KALB: We'll get to the Gulf War in a second.

Let me get Barry Zorthian in. Barry, you did an article, an OpEd piece in a recent issue of the Washington Times. You laid out five guidelines, and the five guidelines are really for what you think should be the relationship between the government and the press now. But are these guidelines specifically out of your Vietnam experience, or post-Vietnam? But go back to that time.

MR. BARRY ZORTHIAN: Well, very much based on Vietnam experience, and a comparison of the situation then to what we're facing today.

Vietnam was what I call an open war. There were no restrictions on the media. The circumstances were such that restrictions could not be placed on the media. The sovereign power was the Vietnamese government. We had correspondents in Vietnam who were never credited to MACV, the Military Assistance Command. And there was certainly no pre-transmission censorship. So correspondents were free to write, to go where they wanted, write what they wanted, broadcast what they wanted without any restriction.

MR. KALB: As you look back upon it, would you say that that is a good thing?

MR. ZORTHIAN: I think in balance, yes. I think the world we're living in today is an open world. Communication is so pervasive that control is not possible today. If you've got a very controlled piece of territory which the military's in charge of, controls transportation, communications, logistics. Maybe you can impose censorship, although it was tried in the Gulf and didn't work too well. At least towards the end.

One point I do want to make, Marvin, and I suppose my role here is to speak for the government side of this thing. I do reject and protest, at least for the years I was there in Saigon, this picture of a constantly mendacious government and a constantly immaculate press. I don't mean by that that the government was always forthcoming. They did by and large project what they believed to be the situation in combat. The press saw it very differently in many ways. There's no monolithic press. There was media with different viewpoints towards the war and different coverage of it and I do think we ought to recognize that the government, at least in those years in Saigon tried to project what it thought was the situation in the field.

Now there's a natural tendency on the part of the military as well as the civilian side of the government to look at things in a more positive way than it is perhaps on a skeptical press. But the picture is more gray than black and white, and I do underline that particular point.

MR. KALB: Peter Arnett, you can pick it up with Vietnam, but I want you also to take us toward the Gulf War. And in the Gulf War, what's interesting to me is that so much of the experience of Vietnam in terms of the reporting and so much of the experience of Vietnam in terms of the soldiers who fought and the lessons they took and then applied toward the press, one could find in the Gulf War. And one perhaps could find applied today as well. What would be your sense?

MR. PETER ARNETT: Well just dwelling on Vietnam briefly, at the beginning in 1962 when Stanley Karnow, David Halberstam and others were there, there was a general sense that what the United States was doing in Vietnam was absolutely justified. And the early critical accounts came from disenchanted American advisors who were simply trying to improve the war effort.

Later, left wing writers criticized the Boys of Saigon for not jumping and attacking the war earlier. But in fact it was a committed press corps. I was from New Zealand, but New Zealanders had troops in Vietnam. We believed it was a worthy cause. To that degree I think here in Afghanistan today you have a media that what's happening, government policy towards the terrorists, is a worthy cause.

Now going on to the course of events in Vietnam, it became a question of what was factually accurate and what was politically embarrassing. So I think to this day, I meet military commanders, in fact I had breakfast recently with General Westmoreland, a pleasant meeting that if you live long enough even old antagonists can come together. I don't think anyone is questioning the accuracy of what the Vietnam reporters put on the air or what television reporters like Ted Koppel and others put on the air. It was a question of the timing. It was politically embarrassing to the United States. That seemed to me the big issue.

Going on to the Gulf War, here we have a... You can't think of the Gulf War without thinking of Ted Turner. I know Ted Turner's not thought of very much now because he's sort of pushed out of the media mainstream, but it was Ted who in the early '80s introduced the idea of globalization of information. Television information.

Now I've worked 20 years for the Associated Press and during even the Vietnam War we had many reports from Hanoi and of course from Moscow and Beijing-based stories from stringers and others, so we did have an internationalization of the news. It was print. It was interesting, but it wasn't controversial. But Ted introduced the idea of international global images and pushing to get what he saw was a way to get both sides of the story, he also saw it as a way to make money.

A little story here. In the early days of CNN, Ted would get a few of us together every now and again for a pep talk, and he would say we're really going to change journalism. We're going to destroy the networks and we're all going to get rich doing it. Ted's worth $6.2 billion today. I'm not. That's all right. (Laughter)

When we come to the Gulf War, CNN had expanded to the degree that we had satellite coverage of the whole world. A signal could go all over the world. The first time that any television news organization had that capability.

In addition, on the ground we had an Iraqi government which as the Gulf War built up, started attracting journalists. They have pretty sophisticated people within the Iraqi government, they'd been working with American international businessmen, they figured that the media was a tool so many people interviewed Saddam Hussein before the bombing began. When the bombing did start they looked at CNN as a conduit, an information conduit. We realized that and we still stayed, even though realizing that we'd have to carefully explain and qualify everything we said.

The pressure of government was very strong at the time. The Bush Administration - Bush I - called up the media. White House spokespeople called up, suggested that we would be unsafe in Baghdad, that we would, the under story or the back story was that having a credible American news organization in an enemy capital would be harmful to the national war effort. It got to the point where CNN actually considered closing down as all the other American news organizations were doing. It was Ted Turner who in the end, given the option of letting some of us stay or ordering us out, said we could stay.

In fact I remember Ted calling after he had made that decision, talking to us, and he was saying to me, "Peter, I wish I could be with you guys on this occasion. It's a historic event for CNN, historic for journalism." I said, "Ted, where are you right now?" He says, "Well, I'm in LA. In fact I'm in Jane Fonda's house." He says, "I'm in her bedroom." I said, "Ted, you would really want to be here in the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad?"

MR. KALB: Peter, is the point here that... (Laughter) Is the point here that if you go to the current war, that no matter what the restrictions, no matter what the self constraints that would be absorbed by a journalist working there, it would be your view that as many American reporters as possible ought to be right now in Kabul? If they could get in?

MR. ARNETT: The point is that CNN globalized television images, and very soon afterwards the BBC went around the clock with news. Then we have Fox, MSNBC, other news organizations. Images were available. In fact had CNN pursued its international sort of effort, they would be in Kabul today. In fact the Al Jazeera Bureau Chief, actually he was on a CNN program three weeks ago and he said that actually two years ago CNN had been offered the chance of getting some kind of bureau in Kabul. Now I haven't checked with CNN, but he did say that CNN could have been there. That actually CNN, as we all know, was concentrating more on domestic sensational coverage and events.

The point is though, that television images have proved durable. Even though they come from Al Jazeera, even though unlike in the Gulf War everything I said, every time I was on the air it was censored by Iraqi authorities. I would explain every day at length to our anchors questions like, well aren't you really a lackey of Saddam Hussein? Are you really credible? Of course part of that explanation, that constant need to justify being there and be accountable helped CNN get through a period of criticism.

But the point is today the image, the global image is not only accepted, pictures are accepted, but they're everywhere and news organizations are everywhere, so CNN doesn't even have to be in Kabul. Someone is there and CNN and everyone else is using the images.

MR. KALB: The images at this particular point are really coming from one source out of Kabul. But what I'm listening to all of you talk about, either directly or indirectly, is this relationship between the media, the press, and the government. Because at one point during World War II you're walking around with uniforms, you could have been picked up by the way, at that point, and considered a military participant and shot. The idea that I'm a journalist would have meant nothing to an enemy at that point.

MR. KARNOW: That could be true in Afghanistan today.

MR. KALB: Absolutely. Even today it could, but they're not in uniform.

MR. KARNOW: The French guy was wearing noose or something.

MR. KALB: It would make them...

MR. SCHORR: In World War II, Marvin, subject to military jurisdiction, the military could really have imposed physical restrictions on them.

MR. KALB: What I'm trying to get at as we move ahead to linking some of these lessons of the past to today, which is where we are, and in a rather confused state. As we all know, there are negotiations that are underway on a weekly and sometimes even on a daily basis between the Pentagon and the Bureau Chiefs here in Washington to try figure out some modus vivendi, some better way of covering the war - better from the point of view of the Pentagon. It may not be the same thing as better from the point of view of the journalists.

So the question that comes up in my mind, broadly speaking is, are there now or indeed should there now be a new set of responsibilities that the journalists in America must understand and must conform to as you go about covering the current war?

Stan?

MR. KARNOW: The question sort of answers itself. Clearly there has to be some modus vivendi otherwise there will be no vivendi. The question is how and when and how it should be applied and what it should be.

I go back to the war in Grenada. That was the first invasion, the first expedition that I know that was ever launched in which the press was kept out of it totally for the first several days. And I recall meeting a colonel at the Pentagon and arguing how can you conduct an invasion in a democratic country against some island and not let the press there? Isn't that anti-democratic? The next expedition we'll have you there from day one - only you.

Ever since Vietnam I have found the military feel that they were let down, if not betrayed, by the press. As far as they are concerned, the propaganda part of the war, the psychological, the public relations, call it what you will, is an essential part of winning the war because it has to do with morale back at home. And to try to maintain morale at home is considered to be a positive duty for the military. In order to do that, they will have a bodyguard of lies around the truth, perhaps. They will maybe tell real and direct lies. Or at the very least, they will try to keep you from finding out and reporting everything that goes on because in certain cases it's embarrassing, and embarrassing to the military means that it serves the interest of the enemy. They will not get out of that.

Their trouble now is that they're being defeated today not so much by the American press as by technology. I mean when you get the people appearing on television live over there and issuing their statements about what's wrong with America and so on, or when you get Al Jazeera getting interviews... How do you stop it?

It almost started during the Gulf War when a couple of people managed to sneak in towards the very end and get into Kuwait before they were ready to announce that Kuwait had been liberated, because they now had smaller, jeep-mounted dishes and you could theoretically get in even though the U.S. military didn't want you there. Since that time it has exploded, that has now exploded. The idea that you have an Arab international television network, I mean that's unbelievable. These people are Third World people. How dare they have...

MR. KALB: How dare they, indeed.

Ted, on a daily basis when you're dealing with the Pentagon and the White House and other parts of the U.S. government, how are you finding that relationship? To what degree are they being open? To what degree do you think they are succeeding in getting the American government's view across to the American people?

MR. KOPPEL: Why don't we focus for a moment, and really I'm picking up on Dan's point. Why don't we focus for a moment on that famous telephone call that Condoleezza Rice made to the presidents of the various news organizations...

MR. KALB: I want to come back to the other as well, when you finish.

MR. KOPPEL: Yes. Requesting that they not use the images of Osama bin Laden and some of his top lieutenants with the not unreasonable argument being that perhaps they were conveying some kind of a message to other cell members of the Taliban or of al Qaeda here in the United States. I thought at the time, what a totally stupid argument. Because, as Dan pointed out a moment ago, anyone in this country with a satellite dish can get Al Jazeera television directly. Anyone with access to a computer can get the internet directly. And the internet, and I'm sure most of you gathered here know this, but the internet was of course designed by the U.S. military for one reason and one reason alone - For survivability in the case of a nuclear attack so that commanders would be able to communicate with one another after a nuclear attack.

So if the whole purpose of creating the internet was to survive a nuclear attack, who in his right mind thinks that you are any more going to be able to control information that comes across?

I'd like to add one other point before you drag me back kicking and screaming to what you want me to talk about, and that is it needs to be stated that not since World War II has there been a declaration of war. So to talk about censorship the way that we discuss it in the context of World War II is not relevant to the Korean War, it's not relevant to any of these petty little engagements that we've been involved in since then. It certainly was not relevant to the Vietnam War. War was never declared. So the issue of the military or the government actually imposing censorship in a legal fashion never arose.

MR. KALB: Okay. Now go back to my earlier question.

When you deal with the government on a daily basis and they're providing people for you and you are trying to get a good and different program each night, how successful do you think the government is right now in conveying its message to the American people?

MR. KOPPEL: Not very good at all. And the irony is, to be perfectly frank about it, we don't get a great many senior government people to appear on Nightline anymore because they would much rather appear on Larry King; they would much rather appear on a program on which they're likely not to get a tough cross-examination, not to mention the fact that they would much rather appear on CNN and be seen in how many countries is it now, Peter?

MR. ARNETT: A hundred and ninety-three.

MR. KOPPEL: A hundred and ninety-three. And even though they may not be seen by everyone in those countries... I mean one of the great ironies of the CNN mystique is that CNN's average audience in normal times during the day is about 300,000, 350,000.

I suspect now in times of crisis the average audience may be up over a million. Any program that appears on ABC, NBC, CBS, any of the regular networks has that beat by a factor of five, ten, or fifteen. But there is a tremendous value that is perceived by the government in having their spokespeople seen in those 193 countries around the world, in foreign ministries, by intelligence agencies. Not to mention the fact that the presidents and prime ministers and generals and defense chiefs of these various governments, when they appear on CNN, they get to see themselves on the air. When they appear on ABC, NBC or CBS, they do not.

MR. KALB: Barry, in your five point guideline...

MR. ZORTHIAN: Marvin, there is only one standard that has historically been accepted as a restraint on media coverage. That is information that jeopardizes an operation or jeopardizes the lives of troops.

Now that goes back to World War I, I believe. That standard was, the acceptance of that standard, observation of it, was not a problem in Vietnam; as far as I know it was not a problem in the Gulf. The media, certainly the responsible media, is perfectly ready to accept that kind of a restriction.

What is heavily criticized in the media is output that is not censorable, not in our open society, not in our scheme of life. Criticism of the general progress of the war, analysis of American reactions, criticism on the military conduct. All that which the military has to learn to accept is legitimate functioning by them. If we restrict censorship, restriction of information to those two points - jeopardizing operations, jeopardizing the lives of troops - the media has been very, very responsive on that in my experience.

MR. KALB: The same question I asked Ted a moment ago. Do you feel that the government has been successful, for the most part, in getting its message out to the American people?

MR. ZORTHIAN: For the most part it has because the media so far in our current situation has not been too challenging to the government. It's starting.

MR. KALB: What do you mean, challenging?

MR. ZORTHIAN: Well, they haven't been questioning too much the briefings they're getting daily.

MR. KALB: Why?

MR. ZORTHIAN: Well, I think by and large they've gone along with the feeling that this is a great threat to the United States, patriotism calls for acceptance of the government's viewpoint, and so on.

MR. KALB: So there is a self constraint underway?

MR. ZORTHIAN: I feel there is. Now it's starting. I think complaints are starting to come up that the briefers aren't doing as well.

MR. KOPPEL: We're only six weeks into this.

MR. ZORTHIAN: Only six weeks into it.

MR. KOPPEL: Six weeks into the Vietnam involvement I think you would have found the same kind of thing.

MR. ZORTHIAN: That's right.

MR. SCHORR: Let me bring up the question which we've brushed against and will have to brush against again. I understand your list of where the press should accept troop ships sailing, operations, all the rest of it. What about the responsibility of the press with regard to enemy propaganda? What about getting, these sons of bitches getting on the air and saying they hate America and everybody hates America. Can we not trust Americans to see things like that?

MR. ZORTHIAN: I have no objection to the media covering that kind of information, Dan. I think in providing a complete picture to the American public... Remember the target here ultimately is the American public. And I think they should get whatever there is on the other side of the picture, and I trust the American public to take that into account and evaluate it accordingly.

MR. KARNOW: I think you have to look at the nature of the war, how long it goes on... I don't want to go back to the Revolutionary War, but I do know since I did write a book about America in the Philippines, we fought a war in the Philippines. Not many people know that. We conquered the Philippines. We fought against the Nationalist Independence Movement. It's great reporting in those magazines like Harpers... It didn't get there in three days, it got there in six weeks. Nevertheless, as it went on and there was a kind of a quagmire if you want, the public began to turn off on it. It was pre-Vietnam in a way without television.

World War I was short. We were there for a short time. Everybody waved the flag when Woodrow Wilson went in. But if you look at the period after World War I there was a tremendous anti-war reaction in the '20s and the '30s.

World War II, yes, we knew who the enemy was and so forth. There may have been some carping about particular things, but generally speaking everyone was supportive.

Korea. The same thing goes on to the point where Eisenhower has to run on a campaign of I will go to Korea and end the war.

Here I just want to make a point. The press is descried or accused of shaping opinion. I think the press reflects opinion just as well. And when the public begins to get sour on a long, indecisive situation like Korea, and we'll go on to Vietnam naturally, the press reflected after... We talk about "the press". The press is composed of people. Like us. Ordinary folks, as the President would call us.

VOICE: Speak for yourself. (Laughter)

MR. KARNOW: Let me just give you one Vietnam example. In 1968, February, Walter Cronkite in the middle of what was called the Tet Offensive which was a devastating offensive by the enemy, Walter Cronkite stood up, did a commentary on CBS in which he expressed doubts about the war and began to indicate that maybe it wasn't going anywhere.

The President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, and everybody to this day said something I fight against, said Walter Cronkite changed American opinion. Baloney.

If you look at the surveys, American opinion had changed four or five months earlier and Walter, in a way, is reflecting opinion as much as he's contributing to changing it.

So we don't want to go back over Vietnam again, we've already done that. I think at this moment there is a lot of patriotism. We are not questioning things. We're taking what we - We, I'm not reporting, but... I suspect if this thing goes on long enough inconclusively, and we get more keystone cops kind of stuff, nobody knows where the anthrax comes from, and we bomb the Red Cross instead of bombing bin Laden and so on and so forth, I think you're going to begin to get a reaction in the press. You're going to begin to get criticism. The military's not going to like that, the Administration's not going to like it.

What's your question?

MR. KALB: You've already had enough. (Laughter)

I'm going to take your question and I'm going to give it to Peter Arnett now.

Peter, you were with CNN, but now that you're free of the constraints of CNN I ask you the following question.

Today we learn, many of us, in the newspaper that there is a major new guideline at CNN and that new guideline says that when you report on say some American military activity in Afghanistan, a Red Cross installation gets bombed, that you quickly point out that this is all in response to the fact that on September 11th 5,000 Americans were killed. In other words, this is now part of the journalistic mantra that is being ordered upon CNN reporters. Your view.

MR. ARNETT: It is ill advised. Certainly on CNN, it is perfectly capable of balancing any report that appears from Afghanistan or anywhere else. When I was in Baghdad I would try to tell the anchors, I am credible because anything I report out of Baghdad is either denied or refuted by the Pentagon or there is a balancing comment from a briefing or from some other source outside. So the balance to me in CNN, the perfect balance was having the country spokesperson make his assessment. Hopefully you could ask a follow-up question, unlike Al Jazeera in Kabul, they haven't asked any follow-up questions, but in Baghdad we'd present the Iraqi view, give their view of what the casualties were, then CNN would go. Meanwhile at the Pentagon this is what they're saying about it, and it would at least allow the public to make an intelligent judgment.

Often the reporter on the scene, certainly in Baghdad, I hadn't a clue what was happening outside Iraq. It was hard enough to know what was happening inside Iraq. So I was in no position to do any balancing. I think it's asking too much for the reporter to do it. Sometimes it was suggested.

I was told by anchors, Saddam Hussein in 1988, he used germ warfare on the Kurds. I said okay, but you say it, not me.

The other factor that is dangerous is that these countries are sensitive. They look at CNN and they say CNN Is here, particularly in say Belgrade during the Kosovo bombing. CNN is here, we'll allow them to be here, but they're here under our conditions. So the moment you sort of start from that scene criticizing the local authorities, you're gone. That's what happened to CNN in Belgrade. In Baghdad they made it very clear if I started casting aspersions on Saddam Hussein I'd be out of Baghdad.

My professional sense said that I don't have to complain about Saddam Hussein, George Bush is complaining about Saddam Hussein more than I could ever do. So I felt justified in presenting my segment of information to be evaluated in the context from where it came from and I thought that was good enough and I think that's how we should evaluate material from Afghanistan.

MR. KALB: Dan, you were with CNN at one point, too. Tell me what your sense of this new ruling is.

MR. SCHORR: My sense of this new ruling is it reflects the kind of defensiveness which we've already displayed in the reaction to Condoleezza Rice's warning to not use all this propaganda. Not only because it might contain coded message, which was really rather silly, but also because it conveyed propaganda and might affect the American people adversely.

Once we begin to see that the government will try to involve the press in playing a positive role in whatever it is that the government wants to transmit, we are in trouble if the press is willing to accept that.

When you take this new thing of Walter Isaacson under pressure, not to appear to be favoring the other side, of saying look, the Taliban will take you and show you where a civilian building was destroyed by American bombs. And you stand in front of that and it's enough to say we're showing you where the Taliban says we may show you, and make it clear that you're not showing those things which can't be shown which may be barracks and God knows what else. All the reporter can be expected to do is to say this is there, and for whatever it's worth, I show this to you.

But for Judy Woodruff to get on in obeying this new order as she did, and say, and let us remind you that these people are responsible for killing 5,000 Americans. Who are these people? The people who live in that building are responsible for killing? What is the relevance of that, other than that the administration says people must be reminded all the time that if you see destruction going on there think of the destruction that they visited upon us. Whether or not that is really relevant to what they're doing here.

MR. KALB: Ted, there was a column written I think within the last couple of days by a Jeff Jacoby who is a columnist, I believe, for the Boston Globe. He was talking about the issue of neutrality fetish. And he was raising this issue about whether journalists should cling to the idea as they present the news of being neutral at all times.

I'm going to throw something in which you may not want to deal with directly, but Jacoby was citing a quote from the President of ABC and the quote was interesting. He was asked at an event last week at the Columbia School of Journalism whether the Pentagon, for example, back on September 11th, was a legitimate target and what's been pulled back. He said whoops, the Pentagon as a legitimate target. I actually don't have an opinion on that and it's important that I not have an opinion as I sit here in my capacity right now.

In other words, he may very well have a private opinion, but as up front public and all, he didn't want to talk about it.

My sense is this neutrality fetish, as the columnist talks about. You know, when Mike Armacost started this he went back to a reference to the War of 1812 because that war and this one is here. And the question that comes up, and a lot of people have asked me, a lot of students have asked me, are you an American before you're a journalist or a journalist before you're an American?

Do you see a priority order in that question at all?

MR. KOPPEL: Let me, if I may, back away a step from that question. You know because you and I talk about this kind of thing a lot that I have a much greater concern about the kind of journalism that is practiced these days. When a camera is trained on a live event, that is a miracle of technology when it's broadcast all around the world. It has nothing to do with journalism. Journalism is the process of editing and sifting. It is the process of selecting and prioritizing. It is the job of putting into context. In other words, if Walter Isaacson had said we have to be careful about not just putting cameras on people and allowing them to talk for half an hour on CNN without putting it into some kind of context, well putting them on live without knowing what they're going to say, without knowing whether it has any importance, whether it should be a part of a news broadcast. I have no trouble with that.

Our job, our function as Americans is to create that sense of context, is to give people as much of a sense of how it is that something is happening, why it is that something is happening, of putting it into as much of a frame as we possibly can. I don't believe that I am being a particularly patriotic American by slapping a little flag in my lapel and then saying anything that is said by any member of the U.S. government is going to get on without comment, and anything that is said by someone from the enemy is immediately going to be put through a meat grinder of analysis.

Our job is to put it all through the meat grinder of analysis...

MR. KALB: Does that mean that there really is, in your mind, a capacity for journalistic neutrality?

MR. KOPPEL: I don't happen to believe that's a function of neutrality. I believe that's a function of applying the intelligence, as much as the good lord gave us, to putting events into context as clearly as we possibly can.

MR. KARNOW: Marvin?

MR. KALB: I want you to speak but I want to let everybody know we've got about 20 minutes, and I would love to have your questions so that if you have a question as soon as Stan is finished with his comment, I would like to recognize you. People will come around with microphones so that you can be picked up.

MR. KARNOW: I object to the word neutrality. I just want to remind you, Peter hasn't told the story, but Peter is famous for a story when Admiral Felt came up to Peter - Admiral Felt was a commander in the Pacific in 1962. He didn't like Peter's reporting and said to Peter, "Okay, Arnett, get on the team." That's what the military wants you to do. They want you to get on the team. They want you to do the reporting the way they want the reporting done.

MR. KALB: Well if you're in the military what's wrong with that?

MR. KARNOW: Okay. Fine. But when you use the word neutrality, and I'm just following up on Ted's point, listen, we live in the greatest society that ever existed in history and one of the reasons - I don't want to sound self-serving - is because of the press. There's no country in the world that's ever had a press like this. And with all the griping the Presidents have done about newspapers and so forth, a lot of it justified, nevertheless, nobody wants to change that system.

If we're going to suffer from things as a result of this horrible episode we're going through now, which I don't think is going to end very shortly, one of the things we don't want to do is lose that quality, that blessing, which is part of the whole American heritage and legacy.

Q: Shlomo Avineri, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, now at the Carnegie Endowment. This is a question to any one of the panel.

You discuss the attitude towards the American government and also towards the enemy, but some of the allies in this effort are non-democratic countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. How should the American press deal with them?

MR. KALB: Barry, you start us off on that. What would you think, as someone who hasn't been a reporter but has watched us.

MR. ZORTHIAN: It depends on what you're dealing with. I don't think the press... We know the Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the nature of their government. Where did we learn it? We learned it through the media.

MR. KALB: But we are learning a lot more now in the last couple of weeks about Saudi Arabia, for example, than we have ever had in years.

MR. ZORTHIAN: But I don't see any restraint on the part of the media in describing the Saudi government for what it's done, what it is doing, the sponsorship of schools in Pakistan and so on.

MR. KALB: Ted, why has it taken us this long to focus on Saudi Arabia?

MR. KOPPEL: Well, we had Jon Benet Ramsey... (Laughter)

VOICE: Chandra Levy got in the way.

MR. KOPPEL: The happiest man in America today has to be Gary Condit. Because those are the stories that... The lamentable fact of it all is that every one of our networks, every one of our parent organizations has just rediscovered for the first time in a few years how valuable a news organization that looks beyond its own boundaries can be. And we didn't do very well for the last few years on that. We really had not done a particularly good job at covering foreign news in large measure because it's expensive, it's time consuming, and when I say you I don't mean those of you gathered here, but the American public by and large seemed to prefer endless coverage of the OJ Simpson trial to what was going on in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Japan or anywhere else in the world.

MR. SCHORR: I think you probably know most of the answer to your question. The answer to the question is partly with regard to Saudi Arabia, that our sports utility vehicles require that we remain on good terms with Saudi Arabia, no matter what. We still had Pakistan because we had to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. And at that time we made very, very good friends with Pakistan and we have to maintain that friendship now, why? Because we are now in Afghanistan.

For every one of these things there is a reason, and in most case I think you know the reason.

Q: (Inaudible)

MR. SCHORR: As to the press, when the press finally catches onto these things... I think it's quite remarkable what the press has been doing in the past few weeks in exploding our cherished relationship with Saudi Arabia. All the way to 60 Minutes which manages to get in with a billionaire and point out what an asinine fool he is. That's off the record. (Laughter)

When people say the press isn't covering things well enough, how do you know? Didn't you find out from the press the things that you needed even to ask to frame the question?

I think on the whole the press is doing fairly well.

Q: Gautam Adhikari, National Endowment for Democracy, formerly with the Times of India.

I was just wondering, do you think that the changing ownership structures of the media corporations and the increasing influence that large corporations involved in other fields of activity, for instance GE, do you think that has made it easier, let's say, for the administration of any country here, particularly in the United States to weigh in on the press and sort of get the people in charge of news management to issue the kinds of orders we were just talking about in the case of Walter Isaacson or some of the other things that happened when Condoleezza Rice requested a certain balance of speak.

MR. KALB: Are you suggesting, Gautam, that the conglomeratization of the news business in recent years has now made it easier for the government to get its view through and to impose certain standards and...

Q: I'm wondering. I'm not suggesting.

MR. KALB: Was that sort of the underlying message?

Q: Yeah.

MR. ARNETT: I would simply say that during the Vietnam War there were only three television networks and no other television coverage other than what they did, so it was easy for President Johnson to call the network presidents - which he did not infrequently. And also during the Vietnam War there were just a few major newspapers had correspondents in Vietnam. A couple of wire services. So there was a very good position in those days to influence.

Today it's very difficult, as I think it's been brought out in this discussion, that there are news sources from all over the world now that the U.S. government cannot get a handle on. So while it will appeal to corporate leaders, and Walter Isaacson certainly works for a company that is a very large corporation, overall the news is everywhere and it's impossible to contain.

MR. SCHORR: With all respect I disagree with regard to the networks then. At that time we had people, be it Stantaon or Peldi or be it Goldensen at ABC, Farnup, who made their money for entertainment and everything else and wouldn't interfere with what the news divisions did.

There was an enormous amount of pressure on CBS, specifically on a story which they'd gotten after three days put together about how Marines had torched a village and the Johnson Administration appealed to them not to carry it. They carried it.

Today these same people, if you go up to the top of a conglomerate, you're dealing with people very far away from the news operation mainly interested in the bottom line of that news operation and if you say that we're against you running this, that and the other thing, it will be very bad, your imagine wouldn't be good, whatsoever, you're dealing with people who don't give a damn about journalism.

MR. KALB: Dan, I think there's probably more of a chance now of conglomerate influence on news content than there was in the...

MR. SCHORR: I wasn't suggesting that the news organizations yielded, but certainly there were fewer organizations for Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon

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