While newspapers strive to report the aftermath of Sept. 11 as completely as possible, fewer details than usual are forthcoming from the military and other government officials who have clamped down on the flow of information in the name of security.
Even so, some readers fear the news media are feeding terrorists facts they don’t already have. The complaints aren’t about secrets. They are about information provided by sources including the military or available through the Internet and books, even the phone directory.
Among the first to complain about too much information were the families of deployed military. E-mails came from some family members who were fearful because the newspaper’s “Standing the Watch” feature had information about the location of ships at sea.
Three days after the attack, the Union-Tribune announced it was suspending “Standing the Watch,” until then a popular public service for military families who used it to follow their loved ones on deployed San Diego-based ships. The decision to drop the coordinates was made out of an abundance of caution even though the information was being provided by some of the ships, said Ray Tessler, assistant metro editor who coordinates military coverage. All the ships stopped providing information after the paper suspended reporting it. A “Standing the Watch” appeared Sept. 11.
It wasn’t only Navy families who were concerned about the newspaper publishing too much information. Two readers were appalled by a Business story Oct. 10 because Rancho Bernardo was specified as the location of the plant that manufactures the Predator, an uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) used in the attack on Afghanistan. File photos of UAVs, either provided by the companies or taken by staff photographers at press conferences, also were of concern to some readers. One was so upset he said he had reported the newspaper to the FBI.
Yet, a story in June that contained some of the same information resulted in not one protest to the newspaper.
The comments about the Oct. 10 story reminded me of similar complaints to the Arizona Daily Star about a story on a company in the Tucson area that manufactures the Tomahawk missiles fired on Afghanistan. Some readers were incensed that the newspaper “would announce to the whole world where the attack missiles came from.”
In Oregon, when an Oregonian reporter wrote about increased security at a chemical depot near a town in the eastern part of the state, one reader e-mailed him: “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?”
In San Diego, a few readers said the Union-Tribune was irresponsible because it printed an Associated Press photo with an AP article about the only plant in the United States that manufactures the anthrax vaccine. Some readers were angry because they could read the address on the Oct. 11 photo of the Michigan facility.
The day before, a man who identified himself as retired military, complained about a graphic of the John Paul Jones and the missiles the destroyer carries. “My God,” he said. “They’ll know exactly whom to attack and where. We’re in wartime. You don’t want to tell the enemy anything.”
If the reader even noticed, it didn’t matter to him that specifics about the ship were provided by the Navy; the widely available reference, “Jane’s Fighting Ships,” and other information already on the record.
When I pointed out to a reader that some of the information she complained about was widely available, she said, “Yes, but you put it all together for them.”
There haven’t been any complaints from readers about stories reporting on ships either homeported in San Diego or that have San Diego residents aboard. You have seen stories, the work of James Crawley, and photos by Earnie Grafton. The stories are datelined with the names of the vessels in the Arabian Sea.
While the stories included quotes from crew members of the warship John Paul Jones and the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, surnames were not used for the most part. As Crawley noted, the military is allowing only senior commanders to be quoted by full names. Others are identified only by their first names or nicknames. Aside from asking that names not be used, the military does not censor stories before they appear in the Union-Tribune.
“As a matter of our own philosophy, we’re very careful not to reveal any details of operational security,” Tessler said. “We want to tell their stories without putting them at any further risk,” he said of the crew.
“A fair amount of the information that’s contained in our stories has some readers worried that we’re exposing too much data about the military and military hardware,” Tessler said, “but in fact, this information is easily available and the military has no objection if it’s disclosed because they want to reassure the U.S. public of our strengths and let the enemy know what they’re facing.”
