Welcome to war in the deep, dark shadows. No front lines, no massed armies, no antiseptic smart bomb wizardry on the evening news.
This is the reality of the war against terrorism, and covering it is already presenting unprecedented challenges for the media as it faces heavy government restrictions on information from troop deployments to operations in the field.
It is an issue journalists face in every conflict as they balance the public’s need to know with the government’s position that protecting troops and plans is paramount to all else.
But if that has caused tension in the past, it may be even more so in a war where top-secret intelligence gathering and the use of clandestine commando units in remote places such as Afghanistan are the weapons of choice.
“I think it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to cover these kinds of operations the Bush administration is talking about,” says Jacqueline Sharkey, who teaches journalism at the University of Arizona and is the author of Under Fire- U.S. Military Restrictions on the Media from Grenada to the Persian Gulf.
“And the initial indications are the administration is going to take steps to limit coverage of these kinds of operations.”
During the past century, relations between the military and press have swung wildly. In World War II, the press was subjected to censorship but considered an ally. In Vietnam, reporters had enormous freedom but were considered by some as aiding the enemy.
It was that TV war-in-the-living-room coverage that caused the post-Vietnam Pentagon to enact tough restrictions, even though public support for the war “declined in direct proportion to a rising (American) body count and was not related to media coverage,” Sharkey says.
The new rules were first seen in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, again in 1989 in Panama, and most notably in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, where reporters were kept bottled up far behind the front while military leaders held carefully scripted briefings that often concealed the truth.
As Johanna Neuman writes in her book, Lights, Camera, War, “Nearly every day military briefings informed a world audience that Scud-missile launch sites in Iraq had been destroyed. Nearly every day, Israelis got private intelligence that Iraqi launch sites were undamaged, having been moved during the night.”
Still, it is those kind of briefings – perhaps very few and far between – that are likely to characterize the extent of the military’s willingness to talk about its terrorism fight, says Sharkey, who covered the guerrilla wars in Central America in the 1980s.
And that, apparently, will be fine with the public. Shortly after the Gulf War ended, a poll found that four out of five Americans thought military restrictions on news reports were a good idea.
To many in and out of uniform, it is more than that – it is an absolute necessity.
“How do you fight a war if that information is available to the public and so to the enemy? You can’t,” says William Martel, who teaches courses in national security at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
“It’s not only the right step but the essential step in ensuring success. I don’t see how you can do that, especially against terrorism, unless you can keep a lot of it in the back channels.”
The enormity of the Sept. 11 attack – in which the nearly 6,500 killed equaled more than one-tenth of all U.S. battle deaths during the decade-long Vietnam War – alone provides the government with a strong rationale to keep information tightly locked, Martel says.
The military, he says, has every right to say, “we will do nothing to compromise operational security.”
Few journalists would argue with that, including Sharkey, who says the press has “an extraordinarily good record” stretching from World War I to the Gulf War of not publishing information that would threaten U.S. troops.
But what is needed, she says, is access to fighting men and women on the front lines to give the public information they need to evaluate how the conflict is going, even if that involves agreeing to not printing or airing the stories until later.
“When the government says it is going to tell us the truth, that is when I become most concerned about the ability of the press to be on the scene, even if it means withholding the information until the operational issues are resolved,” Sharkey says.
Major news organizations are talking with military officials about ways to cover the conflict, but it is not known what will result. About the only thing certain is what California Sen. Hiram Johnson noted in 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I.
“The first casualty of war,” he said, “is the truth.”
