ACJ Refs: Press Controls in Wartime

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[1] Arguably the news reports from Somalia, especially the picture coverage of the treatment of U.S. casualties and a prisoner of war, pressured President Clinton to redefine the U.S. mission there (see Sharkey, 1993 for discussion of the impact of "parachute journalism" on policy decisions).

The military operations in Somalia, called Operation Restore Hope, spanned the end of the George Bush administration and the beginning of the Clinton administration. News media were present in substantial numbers when American troops first landed in Mogadishu (Plunging Ashore, 1992), during the last months of the Bush administration. Journalists had free reign in the theater of operations (Stockwell, 1996), but the use of military escorts (called "jiblets"), planned media opportunities, and scripted responses to reporters' questions increased toward the end of the operation (Maren, 1993), as the Clinton administration prepared to withdraw American troops.

[2] While no mainstream news organization chose to challenge the press restrictions in court, the list of plaintiffs in Nation Magazine is something of a who’s-who of the American progressive journalism world. Joined in this suit are Nation [http://www.thenation.com/], Harper’s, In These Times, Pacific News Service, The Guardian, The Progressive, Mother Jones, The L.A. Weekly, The Village Voice, The Texas Observer, Pacifica Radio News, Sydney H. Schanberg, E. L. Doctorow, William Styron, Michael Klare, and Scott Armstrong, plus a separate lawsuit filed by Agence France-Presse. The list of interested parties with amicus curiae briefs included thirteen members of Congress, the American Civil Liberties Union, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and academics Ben Bagdikian, Todd Gitlin, and Herbert I. Schiller, among others. The defendants included Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Peter Williams, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, and President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces George Bush. While the mainstream press did not join in this suit (see Parenti, 1993, p. 167 for criticism on this point), Nation Magazine v. U.S. Dept. of Defense nonetheless was fraught with the possibility of a different kind of defeat for the military.

[3] Injunctive relief halts an activity in progress. Declarative relief prohibits the action in the future.

[4] Accordingly, the District Court ruled in Getty Images (2002) that “the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is not a public forum and that consideration of Getty’s First and Fifth Amendment claims must be undertaken through the prism of the heightened deference due to military regulations and decision-making.”

[5] The delicate balancing of the public’s right to know and the legitimate need to keep certain information confidential is evident in Justice Brennan’s concurrence.

[T]he First Amendment has not been viewed by the Court in all settings as providing an equally categorical assurance of the correlative freedom of access to information. . . . Yet the Court has not ruled out a public access component to the First Amendment in every circumstance. . . . [A]ny privilege of access to governmental information is subject to a degree of restraint dictated by the nature of the information and countervailing interests in security and confidentiality. (Richmond Newspapers, 1980, p. 585-586)

[6] Quotation is from an agreement signed by accredited correspondents, cited in Boydston, 1992, p. 1078, footnote 58.

[7] Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. American forces were deployed on August 8, followed by the press pool on August 12. On August 26 the pool was abolished and access allowed to all accredited journalists. In advance of the hostilities, the Department of Defense renewed pooling on January 7, 1991 and added review of stories and military escorts to the requirements. The air war began on January 16, and the ground offensive on February 24. Pool coverage of the ground warfare was blacked out for forty-eight hours at the start of the ground campaign; dispatches from correspondents accompanying the ground forces were delayed. Hostilities ceased on February 27, and all press restrictions ended on March 4. (See Olson, 1992, pp. 512-513). The Nation suit was filed on January 10, 1991, prior to the start of the air war, and decided on April 16, 1991, after the restrictions had been lifted.

[8] The full texts of the ground rules, media guidelines, and operating policies of the press pools appear in the appendices of Nation Magazine, 1991, pp. 1575-1582.

[9] Note the following passages from the Defense Department’s “Guidelines for News Media,” issued September 16, 1994:

Media representatives are asked to assist the operation by blacking out network broadcasts from launch points prior to the landing of forces in the area of operation. . . . Do not approach military personnel, especially during hours of darkness, without express military approval. . . . News media representatives who are not accredited with the Joint Task Force Joint Information Bureau (JTB) will not be permitted into forward areas. . . . Security at the source will be the primary and desired means of protecting the operations security of the mission and enforcing the media ground rules.

. . . the media will be provided timely access to the operation, subject to operations security and legal consideration. However, situations may arise in which movement of news media representatives will be restricted or in which a media pool is necessary.

[11] In Operation Enduring Freedom, as in the Persian Gulf War, advocates for unlimited press access to the battlefront have sometimes used the term “censorship” to denote the restrictions on newsgathering, “self-censorship” to denote copy editors’ compliance with security guidelines, or at the least to invoke the term somewhere in taking a position against the access restrictions. (For example, see An Unwitnessed War?, 2001; Kirtley, 2001; SPJ Says Media Should Carefully Weigh, 2001. A very interesting example occurs in the database abstract of the article by Hickey, 2002. The abstract begins, “Discusses the censorship policy of the United States Defense Department.”)

We should note that censorship actually denotes prior restraint, in the form of prepublication inspection and alteration of copy, or of sanctions against publication. Perhaps the word is invoked because of its extreme negative connotation and concomitant rhetorical power, but it is clear that the access restrictions used in the last decade do not constitute censorship in any but the most metaphorical sense.

[12] A survey of news executives listed ten new communication technologies the press used in the Gulf War: electronic mail and computer-to-computer communications; digital transmission of still photographs; facsimile transmission; portable satellite telephones; remotely sensed satellite imagery; frame capture of video images to print; laptop computers; international data transmission networks; flyaway satellite uplinks; and computer graphics (Dennis et al., 1991, p. 35). All of these technological changes increase the speed of newsgathering and reporting, which stresses or bypasses the traditional security mechanisms.

[13] The timeliness of news pictures is of crucial importance to both the military and the news media. The significance of this technological development—and the opposing interests embedded in it—is evident in this exchange between news bureau chiefs and Defense Department public affairs officers (contained in ASD PA Meeting, 2001).

Q: How will the photos be moved and from where?... From the actual site, or is this when everyone comes back to—
A: Every night the pool will come back together to file. That’s so you guys can share the stories, share the information. Remember, this is non-competitive. You go out for the day, you cover stories, you come back in the afternoon, whatever the situation is, and you file.
Q: My consideration on that is our technology now will allow us to transmit immediately. That gives our readers the chance to see the photographs as soon as possible. It seems like it’s offsetting technology if they aren’t going to be reviewed, to come back in, to do something that we could do on site.
A: A photograph that shows up five minutes after the two F-14’s take off to go on a mission, that tells the whole world that five minutes ago two F-14’s took off to go do something.
Q: Well, they don’t know where it is.
A: Those are the kinds of things we have to work out. The instantaneous technology versus these guys are still in the air....We don’t mind your technology, just our time.

[14] Not everyone is satisfied with a moderate role for the press. Some critics have charged that despite its assertions to the contrary the mainstream press acts not as a watchdog but as a mouthpiece for government interests (for example, Parenti, 1993; Solomon, 1992), particularly when military operations are concerned. Nonetheless, it is hard to discount the stridency of the mainstream press’ protests about the access restrictions simply because the protests operated within the “system.”

[15] Polling during Operation Enduring Freedom is generally consistent with polls during the Gulf War. In November 2001, a Pew Research Center poll found that “half of the respondents say the military should exert more control over news about the war; only 40% think the media should decide how to report it” (Hickey, 2002). A Gallup poll in the same month found Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to have an 80% approval rating, compared with 43% for the news media (Hickey, 2002).

Even while aware that the government had withheld information about the war from them, 57% answered “give military more control” to a January 1991 Times Mirror poll question whether the government or the press should exert more control over the Gulf War reporting. In the same survey, another item asking “do you think the United States military is hiding bad news (about the Gulf) from the public or do you think it is telling the public as much as it can under the circumstances?” generated a 78% response of “telling as much as it can” (Milavsky, 1991, p. 32). If the wartime polls on news coverage constitute something of a referendum on the press restrictions, there is ample reason to believe a majority of Americans “feel that censorship for national security is more important than the media’s ability to report the news the way it wants to report it” (Lichter, 1991, p. 2).

That the public entrusted the government with a higher degree of control over information during the Gulf War than it would tolerate in peacetime is not unprecedented. A poll taken during World War II showed 55% of the respondents supported “having official government spokesmen write the war news for the papers and broadcast it over the radio” (Milavsky, 1991, p. 32).

[16] The dramatic change in U.S. policy goals in Somalia following the publication of pictures of mistreated American casualties is illustrative of the potency of news coverage in public dialogue about war. (See, for instance, Gordon & Friedman, 1993; Pringle, 1993; Kohut & Toth, 1994.)

This relationship between the press and government policy is not unique to the United States, but a characteristic of a political system which allows a free press in an age of electronic communications. (See, for instance, Erlanger, 1994 on the impact of the newly-free Russian press on government efforts to suppress a rebellion in Chechnya.)

[17] One military expert noted that in the Gulf War coverage “[a] gross mistake repeated over and over tended to gain a level of legitimacy” (Smith, P. M., 1991, p.131).

[18] See Pejovich, 1990, pp. 38-41 for discussion of transaction costs.

[19] One journalist comments, “I cannot entirely dismiss from my mind the anti-press cant that has pervaded American military journals and pronouncements ever since the Vietnam War” (Browne, 1991, p. 30). Another is more direct: “The military is acting on a generally discredited Pentagon myth that the Vietnam War was lost because of the uncensored press coverage” (Cronkite, 1991). A soldier-turned-writer agrees: "Of the many myths fathered by the Vietnam War, probably the biggest was that we lost because of uncensored, free-ranging press coverage" (Hackworth, 1992).

It may be, however, that journalists perceive their relationship with the military to be more polarized than the military does. An American officer who served as chief military spokesperson for the United Nations Operation in Somalia expressed cautious optimism, in reflecting on CNN's handling of footage of an American pilot held hostage and the corpse of a soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu: "With responsible media representatives who are willing to learn from us, we can successfully negotiate these sensitive issues with them" (Stockwell, 1996). A more collaborative view is also visible in the comments of Department of Defense officials in their briefing with bureau chiefs at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom (ASD PA Meeting, 2001).

[20] It is likely that the press guidelines issued for the Haiti operation in the fall of 1994 would have sparked similar complaints had actual combat broken out. While news executives were pleased that they were able to deploy equipment and correspondents on Haiti in advance of an expected U.S. invasion force (Carter, 1994a), some journalists nonetheless denounced the press guidelines as too similar to those of the Gulf War (Military Censorship Lives, 1994). It is worth noting, however, that the television networks agreed to a White House request to delay reports that planes carrying paratroopers were en route to Haiti, and cited concern for the success of the operation as the reason (Carter, 1994b).