Viewed from afar, the Persian Gulf war seems to hover in a ”Twilight Zone” where time and distance are not fixed dimensions.
Its first bombs and shells flew simultaneously across Baghdad`s skyline and America`s TV screens.
When a missile lands in Israel or Saudi Arabia, television cameras are turned on, closing the gap between battle ground and home front, quite literally, with the speed of light. Afterward, the conflict again fades from public view behind a screen of military censorship.
For 200 years now, war reporting has involved this kind of civil war, pitting the journalists` instinct for scoops and headlines against the generals` desire to keep civilian eyes off the chaos and uncertainty of battle.
In that same period, technology first cut days, then hours, then minutes off the time it takes for a correspondent`s report to reach the folks back home. The irony is that the wonders of modern science are still no guarantee of the quick dissemination of news.
That was vividly demonstrated when Iraqi authorities ordered foreign journalists to take down their high-tech satellite-transmission antennas, which were speeding the graphic reality of war to living rooms halfway around the world. Reporters on the American side of the lines have been similarly handicapped by having to cover the conflict chiefly through official briefings, where questions have been parried on security grounds.
Appropriately, it was the first great strategist of modern times, Napoleon Bonaparte, who invented the generals` principal weapon in this struggle: the military communique. Having come up through the ranks during the French Revolution, Napoleon realized that nations could be won and lost in battles of words as well as bullets, so he carefully scripted an official version of each of his campaigns.
Sometimes the French emperor wrote a second, eyewitness account, which he had printed in Parisian newspapers anonymously to heighten its effect by making it seem the report of an unbiased observer. Indeed, Napoleon was so conscious of the power of the printing press that he made foreign newspapers a high-priority target.
Napoleon also pioneered the euphemisms and jargon with which generals sometimes verbally snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and rhetorically transform stalemates into blitzkriegs. In 1813, realizing his soldiers`
retreat after the Battle of Leipzig could not be hidden from their countrymen, Napoleon issued a communique that established a benchmark for the art form.
”The French Army, although victorious, is arriving at Erfurt as a defeated army would have arrived there,” the emperor explained.
Still, historian William H. McNeill notes, through most of history, war news has been made scarce not by the military`s design but by technological limitations.
Until the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, news could travel no faster than a man on horseback, McNeill explains. Where oceans or seas separated battlefield from home front, reporting was delayed even more.
”Many of the great commanders of ancient times, like Alexander the Great, were accompanied to battle by what we would call reporters,” notes McNeill, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. ”But it might be months or even years before word of their campaigns reached home. War reporting went into history books, not newspapers, which were few and far between before the end of the 18th Century.”
Even when papers were established in America and Europe, their readers often got war news long after the fact. A local reporter witnessed Paul Revere`s ride and the Minutemen`s stand at Lexington and Concord, nicely capturing the feel of those battlefields in an account published in the Massachusetts Spy.
” `Disperse, you damn`d rebels-Damn you, disperse,` ” he quoted the British officer shouting at the American lines, before giving the order to open fire.
But in those days before wire services, that paper`s report had to be hand-carried from Boston to other cities. Thus it was a month before readers in Savannah, Ga., learned of the battles with which our Revolutionary War began.
Sometimes the difficulties of communication allowed battles to enter the history books, even though they need not have been fought. In 1812, England and the United States went to war a second time and Andrew Jackson won a great victory at New Orleans that made him a national hero and elevated him to the presidency. The battle took place on Jan. 8, 1815, even though American and British diplomats had, on Dec. 24, 1814, already signed a peace treaty.
Unfortunately for the soldiers who fell at New Orleans, the news of those successful negotiations, which were held in Belgium, only reached American shores in February.
In fact, it was businessmen, not journalists, who first realized the importance of speedy war reporting, notes McNeill, author of ”The Rise of the West.” In 1815, it took four days for news of Napoleon`s defeat at Waterloo to reach London, a distance of about 240 miles. During that interval, the English capital was rife with rumors that Napoleon had won the battle, causing the London stock market to spiral down.
A market coup
”The Rothschild family had banking interests across the whole of Europe and, having long since learned the value of news, had a courier system to keep them informed of developments in various countries,” McNeill recalls. ”So a Rothschild on the continent sent word of Waterloo by messenger to his counterpart in London, who used that information to make a big killing, buying up stocks at depressed prices before rivals realized that Napoleon had, in fact, been defeated.”
The Rothschilds` coup was a lesson for other merchants on both sides of the Atlantic, and picking up on their news fever, an enterprising Bostonian, Samuel T. Topliff, in 1818 established Merchant`s Reading Room. Essentially it was a coffee house-the great social center of the day-with a gimmick: Members were guaranteed a regular supply of newspapers from England with which to keep current about business affairs there. When Topliff`s success inspired rivals, he responded by sending small boats out to meet sailing ships before they docked, so his subscribers would have their hands on the British papers before they reached other coffee houses.
Then the Boston Daily Mail took Topliff`s system a step further. Trans-Atlantic ships usually made their first landfall at Halifax, Nova Scotia. So the Daily Mail`s editor posted an agent to that Canadian city, who would get the British papers, condense their contents onto strips a carrier pigeon could carry, and send the birds winging toward Boston with scoops over other papers. Rival editors fought back by hiring sharpshooters to bring down the Daily Mail`s feathered carriers.
Shortly, Samuel Morse`s telegraph replaced the carrier pigeon as a way of closing the distance between events and newspaper readers. In 1844, Morse`s invention brought an instantaneous report of the Whig Party`s convention in Baltimore to a Washington newspaper and, as telegraphic lines came to other cities, editors quickly advertised the advancement by labeling stories:
”Latest Telegraphic News.”
So when the Mexican-American War broke out, two years afterward, it became the first electronically reported conflict.
Newspapers organized ingenious combinations of telegraphic operators and human couriers to link their newsrooms with the battlefields. But when American armies marched deep into Mexico, where telegraph lines had not yet been strung, it took upwards of five weeks for reports of the conflict to reach New York readers. Still, those vivid, eyewitness accounts gave the American public a new hero: the war correspondent.
Indeed, many journalists who accompanied the American army considered themselves the generals` equals. Often, they would set down their reporter`s notebooks and take up a rifle so they could offer readers a firsthand account of the sounds and smell of a battlefield. George Wilkins Kendall, editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, was wounded in action, captured a Mexican flag and, by war`s end, was prefixing the title ”Major” to his name.
War reporting quickened further during the Civil War, when photographers, like Mathew Brady, joined the 300 journalists who followed the Union and Confederate armies.
Actually, most of the classic images of that conflict did not appear in newspapers, which still lacked the means to reproduce photographs and instead printed engravings based on sketches by battlefield artists. Still, newspaper accounts gained such a sense of immediacy that generals on both sides used them to learn of their rivals` intentions and dispositions for battle.
On the Union side, that inspired a new concern for security and the imposition of military censorship-a new ingredient of war coverage with far-reaching consequences for all of journalism. To that point, most newspaper stories were still printed anonymously, or sometimes appended with the writer`s initials.
Government censors, though, required reporters to sign their accounts of the Civil War so they could be held responsible for breaches of security. Some editors continued the practice even after the war, and thus was born the
”byline” that rescues the modern reporter from anonymity-at least until the day`s papers go out with the trash.
By the century`s end, the power of the press had so grown that influential publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer could drag President William McKinley into a conflict he never wanted.
The Spanish-American War, notes historian Gerald Linderman of the University of Michigan, marks the high point of Yellow Journalism. It was an era when newspapers abandoned all restraints in their competition for subscribers.
But by World War I, governments had come to regard news as an essential part of their arsenal. When the conflict stalemated into trench warfare, England and Germany each hoped the U.S. would come to their rescue. So both sides tried shaping news from the battlefield to make it seem as if their side was winning, notes historian Stephen Vaughn. To give themselves a head start in that race, the British cut the trans-Atlantic cables linking North America with Germany.
”Lord Northcliff, the British leader, once said: `News is the shocktroops of propaganda,` ” recalls Vaughn, a professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Censorship backlash
Efforts to control news were so successful that they produced a reaction in America after the Armistice, Vaughn continues. So when America went to war again, during World War II, the government was concerned that it not appear to be curtailing freedom of speech in the name of security.
Alongside military censorship was established an Office of War Information, charged with keeping the home front posted and staffed by established writers such as playwright Sherwood Anderson and poet Archibald MacLeish.
”The military would like to hold off all news until they could one day issue a communique announcing that war is over,” Elmer Davis, who headed the Office of War Information, used to say. ”But we`ve kept the pressure on the military to release news and get it out to the public regularly.”
The censors` job was made more difficult by another quantum leap in technology. When Japanese planes appeared over Pearl Harbor, the United Press station chief handed the phone to his wife, who relayed the news of the war`s start to San Francisco, inaugurating an age of reporting by telephone.
World War II was also radio`s first war, and correspondents like Edward R. Murrow of CBS could now, with their dramatic accounts, bring the reality of the Battle of Britain directly into America`s living rooms.
TV`s first war
The correspondents` ascendancy continued through the Vietnam War, notes Peter Herford, who was bureau chief for CBS in Saigon in 1966 and 1967. It was television`s first war, and a conflict in which reporters got to the battlefields long before the generals.
”If you recall, America got involved slowly, first as advisers, and only afterwards as the principal military force,” recalls Herford, director of the Benton Fellowships in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Chicago. ”So the military never did get a censorship in place. We journalists could go where we wanted and report on whatever we wanted to. Those years set the benchmark for war correspondents that we will never see again.”
In the military`s memory, Herford argues, it was those vivid TV pictures of Vietnam`s horrors that turned public opinion against the war. So a lot of military officers came out of Vietnam determined that the next time war came, they were not going to be similarly vulnerable to journalists.
”The Pentagon created a commission to set ground rules for coverage of future wars,” Herford says. ”The policies it set got their trial by fire in Grenada and Panama, with this idea that coverage be limited to `pool`
reporters taken to see what the military wants them to see.”
So the irony continues: Today`s technology allows modern journalism to give TV viewers a seat on the battlefield. But in the war within a war of public imagery, it`s seems clear the generals don`t want the public that close to the action.
