Media Access in the Military: Vietnam to Iraq

“News is something someone wants suppressed,” British newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe once said. “Everything else is just advertising.” This point is especially true in war journalism where every story, be it a heart-warming depiction of troops handing out candy to local children or a gut-wrenching depiction of the horrors of war, can be construed as propaganda. The military of countries that protect the freedom of the press know that it is through the press that their performance, whether a success or a failure, will be conveyed to the people they represent. In today’s world of satellite links and e-mail the relationship between a war correspondent, his audience, and the war he is covering is more complicated than ever. It is now possible for citizens of a country to watch their military fight a war on the other side of the globe in real time. As a result, the military can be held accountable for its actions as they happen, which makes modern war coverage less subject to government censorship then ever before. This can create a danger for military units as reporters often don’t understand the logistics of war enough to know what information will be useful to the enemy.

The history of American armed conflict in the TV era, from Vietnam to the Iraq War, is also a history of how the U.S. military has learned to adapt to the rapid expansion of communication technology during that same period. In Vietnam, reporters were generally allowed to go anywhere and report anything that wasn’t classified. The fact that Vietnam was the first “television war” may be a great a factor as any in the large public opposition that in the conflict’s later years. Many conservatives still argue that Vietnam was winnable, if only the media hadn’t stabbed the military in the back. Learning from those lessons, the military became increasingly skeptical of the media and sought to keep the media from reporting on operations in Central America in the 1980’s. The digital age of satellites and twenty-four-hour news networks was just being born, and to deny it a place on the battlefield was a shortsighted and unpractical solution to the problem of preventing the media from reporting embarrassing or sensitive information. After all, not allowing the media to report anything was far more damaging to the credibility of the military than any individual story could be. The solution between the extremes of Vietnam and the Gulf War lies in the strategy engineered by the Bush administration for the current Iraq War: the embedded reporter.

It can be dangerous to apply the lessons from past battles to the future. It can even be dangerous to apply the lessons of past wars about propaganda and press relations. In war, so goes the cliché, truth is the first casualty. In Vietnam, trust also took a big hit, almost from the start. The way the United States fought the Vietnam War and the way journalists covered it were light years apart from their counterparts in World War II. Vietnam was the first television war and the first uncensored war. It was longer than World War II, and the United States never fully mobilized to fight it. Total victory was never a goal, a definition of "winning" never clear. Regular journalists were not in uniform, and the press corps was truly international and impartial. Complexities and difficulties abounded in ways no one in the military or in journalism could have imagined during the combat of the 1940s. Professional objectivity was the paramount goal of the overwhelming majority of American reporters and many others who covered the war (Rather).

When journalists went to Vietnam, they found a political, diplomatic, and military quagmire, and when they reported it, efforts were made to discredit them both professionally and personally. This led to an escalation of mistrust between experienced journalists and the country's leadership. Had the history of World War II not colored each side's expectations of the other's behavior going in, the sense of betrayal may not have been nearly so powerful. The problems with the military were mostly at flag rank, with a few top generals and the admirals. Most did try to be honest, but the few who were not tended to be of the very highest rank. Their disdain, distrust, and even outright disgust for the press polluted the information environment. This was the exception, not the rule, but it was enough to make a critical difference (Lacey). 

The public at home, understandably and admirably, in my opinion, wanted to believe their government. And because they wanted so badly to believe they were being told the truth, they believed what their leaders were telling them despite strong evidence to the contrary appearing every night on their television screens, every morning in their newspapers, and every week in their news magazines. The public at large did not seriously begin to question the war until casualties mounted to the point where every neighborhood saw a flag-draped coffin return or saw the boy down the street come back without his legs or his eyes. This grim and inevitable result of the war's escalation was key in turning the tide of public opinion; it brought the war home to people in a much more forceful way than campus demonstrations or press coverage ever did. And, by the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the public's rising doubts about government propaganda overflowed into general distrust. People started to realize one of two things: their government had either lied to them or was wildly mistaken. Perhaps it was guilty of both.

By the 1980’s the military was extremely distrustful of the media and that distrust manifested itself in a new attitude toward the press’s right to battlefield access. Matthew Jacobs points out that during the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the press corps “was left behind on a neighboring island and was not permitted onto Grenada for two days. Some journalists,” he continues, “chartered boats in an attempt to reach Grenada independently, but were intercepted and held on a navy ship for two days” (Jacobs,).  While the invasion of Grenada was a relatively minor engagement, the new disdainful attitude that the military had shown there to the press was on full display in the Gulf War, the largest U.S. military action since the Vietnam War. “Since the Grenada conflict,” the New York Times Magazine declared in 1991, “the Pentagon has linked victory with censorship” (Norris).

The current situation in Iraq is far different from the days of the early invasion. As the Iraq War dragged on for longer than planned there were widespread reports of soldiers confiscating and destroying journalist’s materials. When things go wrong it is far more likely that embedded reporters will be outright bullied by soldiers. "Our journalists in Iraq have been shoved to the ground, pushed out of the way, told to leave the scene of explosions; we've had camera disks and videotapes confiscated, reporters detained," says Sandy Johnson, Washington Bureau chief for the Associated Press. On November 12, Johnson sent a letter to the Pentagon, signed by thirty media companies, which cited their concern at "a growing number of incidents in Iraq in which journalists are harassed by U.S. troops in the course of covering the news" (Rosen). Historically, military censorship has been imposed from the top down. This is no longer possible in an era of satellite phones and internet access in third world locations. The embedded reporter policy understands this, and instead tries to align pre-existing forces (the journalist’s desire to be at the front lines, the natural tendency to not bite the hand that feeds) in such a way to produce an organic, bottom up, self-regulating censorship.

But who is responsible for this state of affairs? While it is easy to blame the media for failing to get the true story or to accuse journalists of a liberal bias against military operations, this fails to identify the true culprit. The reason the military is losing the war in the media is because it has almost totally failed to engage, and where it has engaged, it has been with a mind-boggling degree of ineptitude. It is a strange circumstance indeed when virtually every senior officer agrees that the media can make or break national policy, but no more than a handful can name the top military journalist for The Washington Post, The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal. Thousands of officers who spend countless hours learning every facet of their profession do not spend one iota of their time understanding or learning to engage with a strategic force that can make or break their best efforts.

If the journalists have faults, as they surely do, it is because they are more inclined to be ultracompetitive to beat their media rivals to a good headline than to work against the interests of the U.S. government deliberately. Even though the reporters in Iraq are not facing the same risks as those confronting the front-line troops, the journalists display remarkable commitment and courage, and they have been incurring casualties at substantial rates.17 More than 100 journalists have died in Iraq, although most of them have not been from the United States. More U.S. journalists have lost their lives in Iraq, however, than field-grade officers of the U.S. armed forces (O'Hanlnn).

 

Follow this link to read up on the above chart.  See what America thinks about the media coverage in Iraq.

Majority of Americans View Media Coverage of Iraq as Inaccurate 

References 

Alter, Jonathan. “In Bed With The Pentagon.” Newsweek. 10 March 2003

Jacobs, Matthew. “Assessing the Constitutionality of Press Restriction in the Persian Gulf War.” Stanford Law Review

Johnson, Peter. “Media’s War Footing Looks Solid.” USA Today

Lacey, James. "Who's Responsible for Losing the Media War in Iraq?" Military.com. N.p., 2004. Web.11 Dec. 2010. <http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,NI_1004_Media-P1,00.html>.

Newport, Frank. "Majority of Americans View Media Coverage of Iraq as Inaccurate." Gallup. 4 Jan. 2007.
Web. 10 Dec. 2010. <http://www.gallup.com/poll/26038/majority-americans-view-media-coverage-iraq-
inaccurate.aspx>.

Norris, Margot. “Military Censorship and the Body Count in the Persian Gulf War.” Cultural Critique. Autumn

O'Hanlon, Michael, and Nina Kamp. "Is the Media Being Fair in Iraq?." Washington Quarterly 29.4 (2006): 7-18. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 11 Dec. 2010.

Rather, Dan. "Truth on the Battlefield." Harvard International Review 23.1 (2001): 66. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 11 Dec. 2010.

Rosen, Laura. “Journalists Take Flack in Iraq.” The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040112/rozen