The news in World War II, Korea and Vietnam came mostly from correspondents in the field, many of them slogging along with American troops.
But following the war in Afghanistan has meant in part watching some of the least glamorous network news correspondents on television do daily battle in a sterile Pentagon briefing room with high-level “suits,” notably Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and gold-braided “brass hats,” namely various generals and admirals.
The Pentagon reporters carry a heavy load since those often young and glamorous correspondents in the field have been kept away from U.S. military units — and have been told little when they do make contact.
So the burden of bringing many of the facts home to citizens has fallen in large part to these older, very experienced beat reporters who have pounded and plodded the corridors of the world’s largest military bureaucracy for years, languishing in near obscurity during peacetime but becoming household names over the last few months as the bombs started to drop.
These veterans are quick to note the difficulties of covering a covert, small-unit war that the military often refuses to talk about — and that may continue even now that the Taliban has been overthrown. And they readily acknowledge that the influx of reporters unfamiliar with the military and/or a battlefield has led to some press mistakes. They also offer tips on reading between the lines of the Pentagon briefings that define much of the war coverage.
“In this war, it’s Rumsfeld who has emerged as the voice of the war,” said veteran CBS Pentagon correspondent David Martin, 58. “By doing it this way, he has drastically reduced the number of voices that are talking. The more you reduce the number of voices, the more you get a consistent message about how things are going. And he always is determined to under-promise and over-deliver. And anybody who violates that dictum is immediately banned from having anything to do with the press again. They never put out numbers about having destroyed this or that because they don’t want to get caught up in any kind of scorekeeping that could come back to haunt them.”
One example, Martin noted, was the news people who were eventually allowed to report from the Marines’ Camp Rhino base in southern Afghanistan. “Our man there found out that that guy [American Taliban John] Walker was being held there from me. That’s not right.”
This has been a war in which Air Force officers initially refused to be interviewed on the range and combat capabilities of the half-century-old B-52 bomber because that was “operational information,” even though it could be found on official Air Force Web sites and elsewhere. And the Pentagon’s National Media Pool — supposedly the first group of journalists to be rushed to a combat scene — has never been called at all by a press-wary Bush administration.
No `official lies’
For sure, these press veterans have high praise for Rumsfeld, his unprecedented accessibility and his avoidance of the kind of official lies that so soured the U.S. on the conduct of the war in Vietnam. And they would agree with Torie Clarke, Rumsfeld’s assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, that, over the long haul, they have been able to tell the American public most of the story of this war.
But they also are frustrated by the way they have had to cover it.
“I’m sure there’s a lot about this war that we’re going to find out after it’s over,” said Jamie McIntire, 48, Pentagon correspondent for CNN. “The coverage has been the best you can do under the circumstances, but the fact of the matter is that we haven’t had a lot of access.”
“A lot of times the best information is coming out of the Pentagon as opposed to the theater of warfare,” he continued. “We know from experience that by the time reports get back to the Pentagon, they’re rarely entirely accurate. If we’re getting our best information and fastest information from the Pentagon, we know that it’s inherently flawed to begin with.”
Pulling in the reins
As an example of the high command’s tight control of information, CBS’ Martin cited the fate of Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who conducted a Pentagon briefing Oct. 16 in which he said, “the combat power of the Taliban has been eviscerated.” Presumptuous or not, Newbold was proven correct when the Taliban forces collapsed a few weeks later and the opposition Northern Alliance swept into the Afghan capital of Kabul.
But the general was not allowed to conduct another briefing.
“That’s why the access there is so limited,” said Martin. “It’s the same old story ever since Vietnam. We’ve been denied unfettered access to American troops. The military made a decision a long time ago that they’re never going to let that [Vietnam style reporting] happen again.”
It’s a common belief in parts of the military that the Vietnam conflict was lost because negative, on-the-scene news coverage turned the American public against war, especially when it contradicted the sometimes ludicrous optimism of the “Five O’Clock Follies,” the name given a daily military briefing back then.
Martin, who has covered the Pentagon for CBS since 1983, says that syndrome has influenced the restrained way the Pentagon has measured the progress of this war.
A different kind of conflict
“They do not provide tactical detail, meaning movements on the ground either by our forces or the other guy’s forces,” complained ABC’s John McWethy, 54, one of the most familiar faces and voices at televised Pentagon press briefings. “This is a different kind of conflict than we’ve been involved in before, so it makes it more difficult for many of us to understand what has been happening on the ground. But I have the distinct impression that the U.S. government doesn’t always understand what is going on on the ground.”
“The system had its meltdown on the day that that bomb [accidentally] hit those Special Forces guys north of Kandahar,” Martin said. “The reporters at the Marine base south of Kandahar were prohibited from getting anywhere near that.”
“Until recently, we had very few U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan,” Clarke said. “The very few boots on the ground were Special Forces and special operations troops, primarily moving in ones and twos at a time. The secrecy and lack of visibility were vital — we repeat, vital — to the success of their missions and to their safety. Putting media with those Special Forces and that special operations activity would have damaged the mission and put lives at risk.”
Clarke noted that when large numbers of American troops were finally deployed in Afghanistan, at the Marines’ Camp Rhino base, the media accompanied them.
“The media went with the first wave of Marines going into Afghanistan,” she said. “The very first wave. Prior to that happening, there was extensive coverage of the activity in the war. It included aircraft carriers. It included combat air patrols. It included interviews with pilots. There was extensive coverage of that activity that could be covered without endangering operational security or putting lives at risk. If you compare this to previous conflicts, like Kosovo and the Persian Gulf War, there has been more coverage of the military activity.”
NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, 52, tended to side with Clarke.
“I agree the secrecy is unprecedented, but I don’t agree with some critics who feel it’s unwarranted,” he said. “This is a very unusual war for the United States in the sense it is being conducted almost entirely by U.S. special operations forces, including the CIA, on the ground.”
Miklaszewski said many of the complaints about the lack of information have been coming from news organizations with little experience covering the Pentagon.
“Many news organizations don’t routinely cover the Pentagon, so they don’t have reporters accredited to it. This is a very difficult place to just parachute in and cover. You can go to the briefings and get a certain amount of information, but the reporters who camp out here day after day, month after month — or in the case of David Martin, for more than 20 years — these reporters have no problem getting information.”
Lost in the haze
Miklaszewski said the Pentagon does suffer from what Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called “the Fog of War.”
“There are occasions where, if the story is breaking really quickly, you’ll get bits and pieces of information that later don’t prove to be quite accurate. In almost all the cases, they don’t change the overall thrust of the reporting of that event.”
On the opening day of the war last Oct. 7, some broadcast outlets reported that cruise missiles were fired at Afghanistan targets from B-52s. Many cruise missiles were fired, but all from ships.
In addition to being ubiquitous, Rumsfeld has always been candid, Martin said.
“Rumsfeld has been quite open that the point here is to kill people,” Martin said. “Somebody asked him, `Why are we using cluster bombs?’ He said, `We’re using cluster bombs because we want to kill as many of the Taliban fighters as we possibly can.’ Asked, `Do you want Osama bin Laden dead or alive?” he said, `I prefer him dead.'”
Listen for the clues
Martin also noted that if you examine Rumsfeld’s words carefully, there are always clues as to what’s really going on.
“He’s so conservative in his statements, if he says something might happen, it probably already has happened,” Martin said. “When he started saying for the first time, `I’m hopeful we’ll get a surrender in Kandahar,’ well, that to me said it’s a done deal. So you can, if you listen carefully, hear stuff. But I don’t think he’s giving anything away he didn’t want to give away in any of these press conferences.”
Network veterans concede that a lot of bad information comes, not from the Pentagon, but from journalists themselves, especially those giving credence to the often wild stories that flow out of the Middle East.
“There’s already a flood of stories coming out of the region by the time you arrive at work,” Miklaszewski said. “A lot of those stories prove to be way off the mark: American B-52s shot down. Hundreds of Americans killed. And all sorts of wild claims, which we’re forced to pursue. We usually could get them knocked down or confirmed in short order.”
“The war was constantly `entering a new phase’ every day,” said McIntire, complaining about some Afghanistan reporting. “Every day we were `entering a new phase’ of the campaign. My favorite was that for weeks the media were reporting that every day the bombing was `intensifying’ — yet every day at the Pentagon they would tell you the number of planes that went out and was always roughly the same. The intensification of the bombing seemed more related to whether they were falling near where reporters were.”
Mutual respect
All the network correspondents interviewed said that, despite a recent “Saturday Night Live” opening sketch that had a faux Rumsfeld making fools out of the Pentagon press corps, they feel they have good relations with the military high command.
“Rumsfeld complains he’s not really as mean as he was depicted in that sketch and that the press corps is not really as stupid as they look,” McIntire said. “But what it captured is the perception that people have, which is that we’re not all that sharp over here.
“I think Rumsfeld has a healthy respect for the Pentagon press corps. A lot of reporters here have been doing this job for a long time. A lot of them know quite a bit about the military. A lot of military people find out things that are going on from the press before they hear it through their normal channels.”
