The nation’s press has played an important role in helping America cope with the devastating terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and come together in the aftermath. It does this not in any orchestrated fashion but rather as individual news organizations carrying out their role in an open society — informing the public as accurately, thoroughly and quickly as possible. The coverage has captured the horror and heroism, the pathos and patriotism, the words of the president and the images of Osama bin Laden.
It is hard to imagine getting through these two weeks without being able to turn on the television or all-news radio for the immediate update, or to pick up that big morning newspaper or log on to its Web site later in the day.
So far, so good. But the press is about to sail into more dangerous and controversial waters should the country, as seems likely, launch military operations against the perpetrators of these terrible acts.
There has always been a certain natural tension between the press and the military in time of war as they carry out their different roles in a democratic society. But American reporters and photographers have always risked their own lives to accompany U.S. fighting forces into the field and have compiled a detailed, candid and valued record of America in combat.
Reporters also have compiled a record of trust, one that shows they understand and will abide by sensible rules of censorship — not reporting certain kinds of military information that could endanger lives or compromise operations, for example. During a decade of fighting in Vietnam, with thousands of journalists operating within a voluntary system of security guidelines, the number of violations was minuscule, and no accreditations were revoked because of violations.
But after Vietnam — during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1989 invasion of Panama and the 1991 Gulf War — new techniques of press control were put into place that kept U.S. reporters from either witnessing the important opening phases of the fighting or sharply restricted access. In the case of the Gulf War, the Defense Department introduced an array of controls that were so severe that a group of news executives from 15 of the nation’s largest newspaper, television, magazine and wire service organizations wrote to then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, saying they were “deeply concerned about the abridgement of our right and role to produce timely, independent reporting of Americans at war. We are apprehensive that . . . the virtual total control that your department exercised over the American press will become a model for the future.”
After eight months of talks following those protests, the Defense Department agreed, in May 1992, to a new set of guidelines that addressed some, although not all, of the media complaints, and Cheney said at the time that these new principles were now policy.
The Gulf War turned out to be the perfect war; over in four days once the ground troops went in, with very few U.S. casualties and a total rout of the Iraqis. Americans didn’t care much about press restrictions, which they hardly knew about because it was over so fast and because all those government videos showed how perfectly the new smart weapons were working. But if the war had lasted longer and things hadn’t gone so well, the reaction could have been different.
A Pulitzer Prize that year was awarded for stories uncovered after the war was over.
Today, the country is headed into what could be a war like no other. Passions are intense, and the stakes are very, very high. Some of the same top officials during the Gulf War are also in charge of this one, in the persons of Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is no slouch when it comes to controlling information. Restrictions on the press are not likely to rank very high among the public’s concerns.
So as the nation prepares for war, the press is probably about to face the most severe and confounding test of its mission in a free society.
