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We're All War Correspondents Now

BY CHRISTOPHER HANSON

Not long ago, U.S. war correspondents seemed like an endangered breed, often failing to make the paper or get on the air because distant wars had so little seeming relevance in our insular post-cold war society. The issues of wartime information control and media self-censorship were largely academic.
Today those issues are exploding around the world. The suicide jetliner attacks of September 11 sent reporters scrambling to distant staging areas for the U.S. counter-attack. There they struggled to pry even small scraps of information from security-conscious brass, who stressed that much of this new war would be top secret, carried out by shadow warriors far from the eyes of any reporter.
Back home, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon turned America itself into a combat zone and domestic journalists by the hundreds into instant war correspondents, with some subjected to anthrax attacks by mail right in their own offices. Reporters struggled to dig out information, as White House spokesman Ari Fleischer cautioned the media to "be careful what you say." Nearly every domestic news area was soon a kind of war beat -- from police and fire, to health care and the FBI, even to such specializations as food (On October 3, The Washington Post ran a piece on what food to stockpile in your basement).

The stakes in this dangerous new reporting environment could scarcely be higher. American journalists must now grapple with a severe and paradoxical challenge. On the one hand, they must be more cautious because news judgment can quite literally be a matter of life and death. On the other hand, they must be more aggressively independent in the face of huge pressure to pull punches, subdue criticism, and do the American government's work in a ferocious propaganda war with Islamic terrorists.

First to the question of restraint. As veteran war correspondents already know, information is a weapon of war. One has to assume that terrorists have constant access to the Internet and CNN. Premature disclosure of a U.S. operation or other reporting missteps could cost the lives of American combat troops overseas, which is why The Washington Post and other papers say they have muted a few of their own scoops, holding back certain details of American war preparations at the request of the government.

It is now clear that the reporting risks are no less serious on the domestic front, where one must assume that the news audience consists not only of concerned citizens but also terrorists seeking insight on how best to sow death on our front porch. This is a grave situation, requiring even the staunchest supporters of press prerogatives to think about news in a new way. U.S.-based journalists -- whose first impulse has always been getting news out fast -- now need to pause and filter it like any other war correspondent. No matter what the topic, they must ask: Does the public's need to know this information outweigh the harm that it might cause in the hands of a Mohamed Atta? This question might well influence how much detail to include when news outlets break stories about, say, oil tanker construction, Amtrak procedures, building ventilation, pesticide factories.

But it is not an easy question to answer. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, ran a massive piece on September 28 detailing inconsistencies in security precautions at airports across the country. The piece disclosed that a frequent traveler had seen no bags inspected at the Portland, Oregon, airport, that no passengers were seen being frisked in Detroit, that it is still possible to park within walking distance of the Miami and Pittsburgh terminals, that only about 10 percent of the passengers at Boston were inspected with security wands (compared with 75 percent in San Francisco.) The piece reported that a box of knives confiscated from passengers was left unattended at Chicago O'Hare. Accompanying the article was a reader-friendly chart that summarized the relative levels of security at twenty U.S. airports.

Should they have printed such a story in such detail? Many editors say the Journal performed a public service. The story certainly could have put useful pressure on the FAA and airport authorities to make the security more stringent and consistent. The problem, of course, is that one man's public service article is another man's tip sheet for murder. We are living in a world in which a terrorist might have exploited the airport security loopholes before the powers that be got around to closing them. Suppose a terrorist had used the article to plan an attack -- planting a bomb in the parking garage near the terminal or slipping through security at the airport with minimal wanding. Suppose a heavily marked copy of the Journal article was found among the terrorist's personal effects. In that case, the Journal would probably not be up for a public service award.

On the other hand, suppose that the Journal chooses not to report its story. And suppose that terrorists -- constantly checking airports on their own -- see or hear about the loopholes themselves. And then make their move before authorities are pressed by the newspaper to close those loopholes. Hard choices.

One could face similar choices about reports that many trucks were not being searched as they entered Manhattan and that inspection of large trucks carrying hazardous materials was hit or miss in some western states. One also has to wonder about the wisdom of running an NBC segment showing sections of the Canada-U.S. border where someone could easily cross undetected by boat.
Even more striking were reports that included details on how a terror attack could be launched. Ted Koppel, for instance, rebroadcast on October 5 a three-year-old Nightline report that showed how terrorists might use a subway tunnel to spread anthrax with great lethal effect. The report was presumably intended to put pressure on the authorities to beef up security and Koppel, appearing live, assured the audience that terrorists were already well aware of the technique. If so -- a big assumption -- we can't rule out the possibility that they learned the technique by watching Nightline three years before. When The Washington Post ran a piece detailing how crop duster nozzles of a certain size can be used to spread biological weapons, the paper's Outlook editor, Steven Luxenberg, printed an unusual rebuke. "Readers don't need an education in nozzle technology," he wrote in a September 30 op-ed piece. Luxenberg quoted an e-mail from a reader, who declared: "I am in a state of shock that anyone who values human life would publish this information."
 
While reporters have been too zealous in disclosing potentially endangering details, they have at times not been zealous enough in guarding their independence, autonomous judgment, and role as verifiers of fact. At the outset of any war, the government p.r. apparatus attempts to co-opt news media to channel the official version. Such efforts may have been particularly hard to resist in the current conflict, given that some 5,000 civilians were slaughtered on U.S. soil. The attacks drove Bush's approval ratings into the stratosphere, drew party leaders together, and rallied the country. Perhaps not since World War II had there been such strong pressure on the media to join the team.

That pressure was evident on October 10 when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice convened an unusual teleconference with TV news executives. She urged them to stop airing live or unedited video statements from top terrorist Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, who had unleashed anti-American diatribes after Washington launched its bombing campaign against them in Afghanistan.
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Rice gave two reasons for making her request.

One was that the terrorist leaders might use such statements to send coded messages to terror cells. This claim might have been compelling, if backed up by hard evidence. But as The New York Times reported, Rice's warning did not seem believable to several of the news executives. With good reason. After all, undercover terrorists could still find transcripts of Al Qaeda messages online and could download video clips from the Internet.

Even so, CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC, and CBS agreed among themselves that, in order to allow them to make appropriate editorial judgments, they would not broadcast live such statements from bin Laden or other Al Qaeda spokesmen. They were responding largely to the second reason Rice gave for caution: that running al Qaeda statements in full bolstered bin Laden's propaganda punch, and could increase anti-American sentiment, not just among Muslims in the United States but those in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other countries that received CNN or other American networks. When Al Qaeda released its next video message on October 12, much of the TV coverage stuck to excerpts and quoted U.S. officials dismissing the statement as propaganda.

"We are giving the government the benefit of the doubt; the propaganda issue is a legitimate issue," CBS president Andrew Heyward told The Washington Post. It was a "patriotic" decision, one TV exec told The New York Times.

The administration indeed faced a serious problem. It was not faring well in its propaganda war with Al Qaeda. The U.S. bombing in Afghanistan was inflaming already deep anti-American sentiment among Muslims, and bin Laden was exploiting that resentment. America's propaganda beachhead in the Islamic world was tenuous at best.

Pressing American networks into self-censorship was no solution, however. Al Qaeda statements were being carried worldwide by non-American news outlets, so people overseas and some in the U.S. would be getting them anyway. Curtailing the U.S. TV network version would be like bandaging the finger of a patient bleeding from a hundred wounds. It is also important to keep in mind that America's poor showing in the propaganda conflict was not the U.S. media's responsibility, but did stem in part from American government policies -- among them U.S. support for regimes widely considered corrupt (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) and negligible U.S. propaganda efforts in the Islamic world. The sensible solution is not for the Bush administration to conscript the independent media in a feeble attempt to filter out Osama, but rather to launch effective propaganda of its own.

The networks responded to pressure nonetheless, depriving the American audience of a chance to know and understand its enemy more fully. Faced with a choice between covering a propaganda war and participating in one, they seemed to slide toward participation. This was a popular decision with the U.S. audience in the short term, perhaps, but one that could undermine the key role of network news as a detached observer, believable because it maintains a staunch independence from government.

Consider also the coverage of Bush as commander-in-chief in the days following the attack. Bush had been seen by many as a green and somewhat shaky leader. So after September 11, the White House p.r. crew leaked juicy "insider" anecdotes casting Bush as cool, decisive, and well-informed. The Washington Post, in a front-page September 23 article, depicted Bush as the man in the driver's seat, setting a tight deadline for his crucial crisis speech to Congress. The New York Times (September 23) depicted Bush dictating a line of policy decisions to national security adviser Rice, who was reported to be taking extensive notes.

Some reporters might have lapped up the anecdotes because they were desperate to tell some kind of inside story, while others, like many in the news audience who observed White House decisions during the early weeks of the crisis, might have believed that Bush was in fact rising to the occasion, displaying increasing confidence after his speech to Congress on September 20.
But one suspects that something more deep-seated was animating the coverage. In times of national crisis, the media generally fall back on one of two generic story lines. If the president is seasoned, the story is about a tested leader swinging into crisis mode (FDR after Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower dealing with Korea.) If the president is unseasoned, the story is about a man tapping as yet unseen inner strengths, and rising to the challenge (Lincoln in 1861, Truman succeeding FDR, JFK in the missile crisis, Reagan after the assassination attempt.) There is generally no option three at the outset of a crisis, because, in our prevailing national faith, America and its leaders flourish in adversity. The bigger the crisis, the more intensely we believe. Only the most spectacular failures (Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis) can puncture the myth.

So it was that some TV pundits, commentators, and columnists were tempted to overstate the case that Bush had suddenly grown into the presidency a mere nine days after the suicide planes hit their targets. So it was that, when Bush gave the first prime-time press conference of his presidency on October 12, The New York Times discerned a "new gravitas." The Times reported that Bush had reassured the world by the "bold move" of coming before the cameras, testing himself by answering reporters' questions. The evident theory behind this report was that a president brave enough to face the press can also face down bin Laden.

It might turn out that this president is eventually transformed by fire from Prince Hal into Henry V, as CNN's Jeff Greenfield put it. But at this point that is wishful thinking, and real news is more than a wish list. It is an aggressive search for verified facts.

Today that search is especially important because American media might well be facing their toughest challenge, covering the murkiest war in U.S. history. At times we do not even know if some horrific incident is actually part of the new war -- as witness the anthrax-by-mail attacks of October. We will probably not know when this war has ended, if it ever does. (As Defense Secretary Rumsfeld noted, there will be no surrender ceremony.) And, given the emphasis on secret operations, reporters will be hard-pressed to chronicle the war's key developments, from commando raids to intelligence operations to cyber attacks.
One can only hope that journalists, too, can rise to the occasion, dig out the story, report the victories and unflinchingly expose the blunders as they go once more into the breach.
 
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Christopher Hanson, a CJR contributing editor, covered the Pentagon and two wars as a newspaper reporter.