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A Case of Shell Shock by Howard Kurtz 
For Media After Iraq, A Case of Shell Shock Battle Assessment Begins For Saturation Reporting By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 28, 2003; Page A01 They reported from the trenches, hitched rides in tanks, slogged through sandstorms, dodged enemy fire and used whiz-bang technology to bring the war, live and unfiltered, into living rooms around the world. And yet, despite the investment of tens of millions of dollars and deployment of hundreds of journalists, the collective picture they produced was often blurry. "The fog of war makes for foggy news," said Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "War is too messy to package into sound bites and two-minute stories." Now that the shooting is over, these questions hang in the air: What did the media accomplish during the most intensively and instantaneously covered war in history? Did the presence of all those journalists capture the harsh realities of war or simply breed a new generation of Scud studs? Were readers and viewers well served or deluged with confusing information? And what does it portend for coverage of future wars? Just as laser-guided weapons enabled the United States to wage the most precise military conflict ever attempted, the media's combination of near-total access and advanced technology produced a chronicle fundamentally different from that of every other war. Mobile satellite dishes and videophones brought viewers an unprecedented look at the front lines, with soldiers donning chemical suits, firing at Iraqi forces, steering tanks through the desert, even granting interviews after being wounded. The work was nothing if not dangerous. Twelve journalists, of perhaps 1,500 in the war zone, died in three weeks, a far higher casualty rate than that suffered by U.S. forces. Most of the public liked what it saw, with 74 percent of those in a Pew Research survey early this month giving excellent or good marks to the war coverage. Bush administration officials are pleased with the Pentagon's program of "embedding" 600 journalists with U.S. and British forces, although they lashed out at the parade of retired generals sounding off on television. President Bush praised the coverage at a media dinner Saturday night, and Vice President Cheney said recently that "the troops have come to know reporters who are willing to accept the hardships and dangers of war in order to get the story right." But just as the war in Iraq divided the country, the nation's news organizations are being assailed from the left and the right. Some critics say they served as cheerleaders for the Pentagon propaganda machine. Other critics say they were too negative about a stunningly successful war effort. Still others say they glossed over Iraq's civilian casualties. And even some news executives say the real-time reports from the field provided misleading snapshots of how the war was going. The Pentagon Plan For months, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke had been telling anyone who would listen that this war would be different. Forget the mutual animosity of the past quarter-century, she said; reporters would be welcomed into the front lines and given the freedom to do their jobs. Unit commanders got the message, Clarke said, because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers sent the troops a rare "P-4" memo -- personal for those receiving it -- urging cooperation with the press. "We put the same planning and preparation into this as military planners put into the war effort," she said. When U.S. soldiers killed families who refused to stop at checkpoints, "you just felt horribly for everybody involved. But because we had embedded reporters there, it was represented in a way that recognized the difficulties involved." Initially, the embeds, as they were called, produced more or less what the military wanted, a stream of upbeat features that served to humanize America's fighting men and women. Even some journalists conceded it would be hard to write critically about their units because, as ABC's John Donvan put it, "they're my protectors." But when things started to go wrong, some of the embedded reporters filed raw and unflattering accounts, such as New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins quoting a sergeant as saying he shot an Iraqi woman because "the chick got in the way." Phil Bronstein, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, said the embedded TV correspondents "were only able to see little slices of the pie" but that their reports "have been run and run endlessly and they're not informative. There's an entertainment factor that's huge in television in creating this drama. It's about them." Paul Slavin, executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight," called embedding a "terrific experiment" but says Pentagon briefings failed to broaden the picture. "We were looking at the battlefield through 600 straws," he said. "It was difficult to contextualize it. All of a sudden the operation was 'stalled.' The operation wasn't stalled -- some units were stopping and reassessing." Most embeds concede that their perspective was limited. "I certainly did not get a clear picture of the war because we were so isolated," said ABC's Don Dahler, who was with the 101st Airborne. "My job was to look at things through a microscope, not the binoculars." Said CBS's Jim Axelrod, who was with the 3rd Infantry Division: "This will sound like I've drunk the Kool-Aid, but I found embedding to be an extremely positive experience. There was some initial mistrust and suspicion: 'Who are you guys and what are you gonna do to harm us?' But we got great stories and they got very positive coverage -- in large part because there were some very compelling stories to tell about the military." As the debate swirled around them, the reporters increasingly got swept up by combat. An armed bodyguard with CNN's Brent Sadler returned Iraqi fire near Tikrit. Boston Herald reporter Jules Crittenden pointed out three snipers for his unit's soldiers to kill. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution photographer held an intravenous drip bag over a wounded civilian's stretcher. CNN correspondent and doctor Sanjay Gupta operated on a 2-year-old Iraqi boy. The embeds were complemented by so-called unilateral reporters not tied to any military unit, enabling them to travel with Northern Iraq's Kurds, as did NBC's Fred Francis, or spend time with British minesweepers, like CBS's Scott Pelley. But while they added another perspective, these hundreds of journalists were hampered by huge logistical challenges. Whatever their mode of travel, correspondents raced to keep pace with a fast-moving war, which inevitably produced mistakes. Fox initially described a grenade attack at a base in Kuwait as the work of terrorists, as did a first-edition story in The Washington Post, although a U.S. soldier was later charged. Some cable networks trumpeted a report that chemical weapons had been found in Iraq, but the material turned out to be pesticides. Critics, meanwhile, ripped the tone of the coverage as too hyper, too impatient, too speculative, too filled with what Rumsfeld called the media's "mood swings." "There were moments when the general coverage got pretty negative and the people running the government got prickly about it," said MSNBC President Erik Sorenson, who tried to rein in the speculation. "There is a fog of propaganda, no doubt." Kathryn Kross, CNN's Washington bureau chief, maintains that "journalists serve their audience by being appropriately skeptical. If viewers are after cheerleading, they're looking in the wrong place. It doesn't mean we're not patriotic." Fox News Vice President John Moody faults the manic-depressive approach: "We maybe made some snap judgments, such as 'This is a cakewalk.' 'Oh my God, we're bogged down.' 'Will we ever reach Baghdad?' 'How did Baghdad fall so easily?' Some networks were a little down at the mouth and ready to declare unilateral surrender." At Fox, Moody said, "there were moments when I wanted to make sure we did not cheerlead," such as barring correspondents from referring to "good guys" and "bad guys." At the same time, CBS News President Andrew Heyward dismisses criticism that media outlets were too "jingoistic" in their coverage. "American journalists are rooting for America to win," he said. "You're not going to find a lot of Americans rooting for Iraq. That doesn't mean they're not objective and fair in their reporting." This was not a war that could be covered on the cheap. Each of the major networks assigned 200 or more staffers and spent tens of millions of dollars on its coverage. The broadcast networks, however, offered little live reporting after the first two days of the war, leaving that to cable. Newspapers devoted enormous resources to the war, with the biggest dailies publishing extra sections or pages stuffed with details and maps on military strategy, diplomacy, the propaganda battle and the impact on ordinary Iraqis. They were also helped by technology. Satellite phones enabled print reporters to deliver scoops by filing their stories immediately from almost anywhere. The Post's William Branigin, for example, contradicted the Pentagon's account of the killing of 10 civilians at a checkpoint by quoting an Army captain as berating one of his soldiers for not firing a warning shot soon enough. Not every print organization could afford to go all out -- Cox Newspapers gave five of its eight embedded slots to CNN in exchange for freelance contributions -- but even such small papers as the Knoxville, Tenn., News-Sentinel and Lakeland, Fla., Ledger sent a reporter to cover the local troops. While print journalists also struggled to gauge the war's progress -- "War Could Last Months, Officers Say," said a March 27 Washington Post headline -- they offered calmer assessments in a noisy environment. That is, they tried to tie together the strands of military, diplomatic and political strategy, along with the war's impact on local families and around the world. "I thought it was newspapering at its very best," said Ned Warwick, foreign editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "We were able to take a breath and sort out what happened, compared to the overwhelming immediacy of television, where there was no ability to step back and provide context." Colin McMahon, the Chicago Tribune's foreign editor, said one of his reporters saw the limitations of television in the Iraqi town of Safwan: "When the TV cameras were on, everyone was cheering, 'Saddam! Saddam!' When the TV cameras went off, they came over to the print reporters and said, 'Please don't leave this time.' These people were scared to death about Saddam surviving." Just as television replaced the week-old movie newsreels of World War II, the Internet made its mark on this war. There were dozens of war "blogs," or one-person online journals -- the authors ranging from L.T. Smash, the pseudonym for a military officer in the field, to Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya. The most opinionated war bloggers criticized the mainstream media's coverage, providing an hour-by-hour check on those who once had the megaphone to themselves. Lifting the Media Blackout When the Pentagon invited media outlets ranging from the New York Times to People magazine to MTV to accompany U.S. and British forces, it was nothing less than an attempt to bury the ghosts of Vietnam. That jungle war bred a generation of mistrust between the military, which felt that downbeat press reports had helped turn the country against the conflict, and the media, which felt misled by officials insisting that victory was around the corner. No journalists accompanied U.S. forces in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. Reporters who traveled to the island in boats were turned away at gunpoint. During the 1989 invasion of Panama, hundreds of reporters and film crews sat helplessly in planes parked in Miami and Costa Rica, despite Pentagon promises to help them reach the country. There were no pictures or eyewitness accounts of three battles the first day, in which 23 U.S. soldiers were killed and 265 wounded. When the ground assault began in the first Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon actually declared a news blackout. "Pool" reporters were dispatched with some military units, but their dispatches were censored, delayed and sometimes blocked by military minders. On one aircraft carrier, journalists were detained in a small room when the war started. During the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon kept most journalists off the battlefield, saying there was no way to take them on risky Special Forces missions. Coverage came mostly from official briefings and from correspondents who tagged along with the Afghan rebels fighting the Taliban. Some journalists trying to report on civilian casualties ran into military roadblocks. Media coverage of world affairs, meanwhile, has been withering on its own. Except in time of war or natural disaster, many news executives, particularly in television, concluded more than a decade ago that Americans had little interest in news beyond their borders. Media analyst Andrew Tyndall says the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts plummeted from 4,032 minutes of coverage from other countries in 1989 to 1,382 minutes in 2000, before rebounding to 2,103 minutes last year. Tyndall attributes the steep decline to the end of the Cold War and network budget cuts that slashed the number of overseas bureaus. Newspapers stretched their limits during the war. At the Chicago Tribune, the space for foreign news increased by more than a quarter -- and the paper made good use of a foreign staff that has grown from 10 to 15 reporters since 2001. "After 9/11, there was a sense of vindication at this institution for spending the money on foreign coverage," said foreign editor McMahon. Could the modest rebound in foreign coverage continue? History suggests otherwise. "Within six months of the end of the first Gulf War, Iraq disappeared from the daily coverage," Tyndall said. The Tyndall Report shows 1,177 minutes of network reporting on Iraq in January 1991, when the war started, but just 48 minutes in August 1991. The war in Afghanistan received 306 minutes of coverage on the newscasts in November 2001, but that dropped to 28 minutes by February 2002, and last month it was one minute. Since Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed, the media's attention has started to drift. Two-thirds of the embedded reporters have left their units. The hot story on the cable networks in recent days was the murder of pregnant California woman Laci Peterson. NBC's "Today" did a segment on a miracle dog who survived being hit by a car. Time's cover last week dealt with women and heart disease, not war. Numerous reporters have remained in Iraq to cover the postwar struggle. Television has continued to focus on arresting images, such as tens of thousands of blood-drenched Shiites marching after slashing themselves with swords. But the Iraq narrative is now being driven by newspaper stories. The New York Times reported an Iraqi scientist's claim that the regime had destroyed chemical and biological weapons shortly before the war began. The Boston Globe cited criticism from arms-control specialists that no weapons of mass destruction have been found. The Washington Post disclosed that some senior administration officials are pushing for a fast U.S. exit from Iraq. The major papers have also published detailed pieces on the culture of the Shiite majority and the war's lingering impact on ordinary Iraqis. The Los Angeles Times reported on the difficulty of identifying bodies that have piled up in urban dumping grounds. But even newspapers are scaling back. The Wall Street Journal and USA Today had no front-page Iraq story Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. While the Inquirer ran 20 stories a day during the war -- about a third more than usual for foreign news -- Warwick said that "when that statue [of Hussein] came down, the space began to contract pretty rapidly. Given the brutal nature of the combat, people are wanting to hunker down and get as far away from it as they can. I was hearing readers say, 'Enough! Enough!' " Sniping From Both Sides It seems like a contradiction: news organizations simultaneously accused of being too negative and too pro-administration in their war reporting. Some critiques have been fueled by ideology, as underscored by the Pew finding that twice as many of those opposed to the war are unhappy with the coverage. From the right, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a longtime proponent of ousting Hussein, called the downbeat coverage in the war's early stages "close to disgraceful." "The people sitting in Washington and New York who were supposed to provide perspective were the ones who got most carried away by the predictable daily ups and downs of war," Kristol said. "There was a lot of silliness there for a few days. . . . There was a debunking spirit that ended up looking foolish." From the left, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the Nation editor who opposed the war, said the media lost sight of the administration's original rationale: "It quickly became a war of liberation in the coverage. Only late in the war was more attention paid to the professed reason we went to war, weapons of mass destruction." On television, she added, "we haven't seen the other side of the war that the Arab world saw -- the anger and humiliation that millions of Americans won't understand, emanating from the Arab world." Images of civilian casualties have also been handled gingerly. Juan Vasquez, the Miami Herald's foreign editor, said he noticed many Latin American newspapers playing up pictures of dead and wounded Iraqis, while at home "there were a lot of pictures of U.S. soldiers moving forward, U.S. soldiers being shot at, tanks and the machinery of war. The issue was discussed within the newsroom: Are we sanitizing the war?" His answer was no. In the Latin press, he said, "a lot of it is simply gore for the sake of gore, done to make a point that this is a bad war." Television is traditionally more cautious about showing dead bodies. "We were reluctant to run graphic images of any casualties, civilian or military," said MSNBC's Sorenson. "Antiwar activists have complained to MSNBC, 'You've made war seem like fun. You cleaned it up.' We saw and experienced a lot of the power and horror of these weapons. I didn't need to see the body literally chopped in half." Whatever its flaws, the war coverage was so close-up and relentless that there was no time for a credibility gap to develop, either for the Pentagon or the media. There was, instead, a comprehension gap, as viewers and readers drowned in information and struggled to make sense of the blur of events. But there's no going back. Ever since the telegraph was used to carry Civil War dispatches, every scientific advance has raised the bar for the next conflict. "This is going to change American war coverage forever," said CBS's Heyward. "The alternative -- lack of access -- is clearly far worse. People got to see the human side of war in a way that really hasn't happened since Vietnam." While the military has launched an official review, Pentagon spokeswoman Clarke sees no reason to abandon the embedding process in a future war. "You've got hundreds and hundreds of journalists who have now had a very real and enlightening experience with the U.S. military, and that's a good thing," she said. "I'm sure there are still some skeptics on the military side, but they're smaller in number." © 2003 The Washington Post Company |