[NUJ Bristol] Pentagon drawing battle lines for press

--=======49413B7E=======
Content-Type: text/plain; x-avg-checked=avg-ok-5BD05D29; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/324/living/Pentagon_drawing_battle_lines_w
ith_press-.shtml

Pentagon drawing battle lines for press
By Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff, 11/20/2002

WASHINGTON - When Army Times writer Sean Naylor linked up with the 101st
Airborne Division in Kandahar to cover the Afghanistan fighting, he found
that instead of the traditional practice of being housed with the troops,
reporters were ''quarantined'' in media tents. During USA Today reporter
Andrea Stone's visits to Guantanamo, Cuba, she was never even allowed
within shouting distance of the US-held detainees. And although he was
traveling with US forces, San Diego Union-Tribune reporter James Crawley
had to scan transcripts of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Washington
briefings to glean any hint of information about the Afghan war-related
mission he was covering.

''People on the ship wanted to talk about it,'' he said. But ''everything
was directed from the Pentagon. What do we need to do about it next time?''

That question was a rallying cry for the more than 100 journalists - many
of them veterans of conflicts from Kosovo to Afghanistan - who gathered
here last week for a conference sponsored by the two-month-old organization
Military Reporters &  Editors. With a potential war in Iraq on the horizon,
the answer they heard was not reassuring. Given Afghanistan as an object
lesson, the consensus was that Rumsfeld's Pentagon has taken the art of
information control to new heights. And that isn't likely to change in any
battle for Baghdad. (Although keynote speaker Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post offered the distinctly dissenting view that there was no
more than a 50-50 chance of conflict.)

''This Pentagon practices, regularly, lack-of-information warfare against
the press,'' said Mark Thompson, Time magazine's national-security
correspondent. ''Longtime sources in the building that you could call up
and visit, they don't want to be called. ... This is a much different
place.'' History Channel host Arthur Kent - best known as NBC's ''Scud
Stud'' during the 1991 Gulf War - predicted that in the event of another
war with Iraq, ''attempts to muzzle us ... are going to be unprecedented.''

The media and military's competing - if not clashing - agendas were
highlighted in the remarks of Air Force Colonel Jay DeFrank, a Defense
Department representative. Even as news outlets make plans to cover another
war against Saddam Hussein, DeFrank declined to discuss such a contingency,
saying that ''the president has made no decision about what we're going to
do.''

''We're committed to access,'' he told the MRE gathering. ''But it's
probably not going to be the access you want.''

Problems with access to battlefields is a major reason why the MRE was
conceived during a journalism confererence at the University of Maryland
last spring. Actually, as MRE president and Seattle Post-Intelligencer
staffer James Wright acknowledges, the organization's origins can be traced
to a slightly lubricated bull session in a lounge ''where everyone was
griping like you couldn't believe.''

But MRE is about more than lobbying the Pentagon for a better view. It
plans to offer training for journalists, providing them with practical
advice on how to travel with troops, helping them understand the military
culture, and advising them on how to win the trust of the men and women in
uniform. Veteran Scripps Howard reporter Peter Copeland recalled how his
editor once told him the way to achieve that last goal was to ''act like
you're on your first date.''

If many of the speakers spoke warmly of the relationship between
journalists and rank-and-file troops, there was concern about the
Pentagon's top-down strategy of news management.=20

''There is a general sense that [information control] is just a higher
priority with this administration,'' said USA Today military writer and MRE
vice-president Dave Moniz. ''Even a lot of uniformed military officers are
blanching at these restrictions.''

Compound that with all the lethal uncertainties of a new war in Iraq, and
the outlook isn't good for reporters.  Retired Army Major General John
Meyer Jr. said that if the war plans he had read about were accurate,
''inherently, you have chemical, biological, and nuclear potential on the
battlefield. ... I would think your access will be harder to get.''

Wall Street Journal staffer John Fialka told his colleagues that such a war
holds out the possibility that ''we're going to have some dead bodies among
us.''

Perhaps nothing reflected the uneasy relationship between the military and
the media more clearly than a discussion of the Pentagon ''boot camp''
training for journalists that began last weekend.=20

The physically rigorous program has been lauded by some media outlets as a
positive step in improving the relationship between the Defense Department
and reporters.
But juxtaposing the harsh physical demands of the boot camp with
predictions of minimal access to any war, USA Today's Stone mused aloud,
''Maybe they're just trying to scare people off.''

This story ran on page C3 of the Boston Globe on 11/20/2002.
=A9 Copyright 2002 New York Times Co.

--=======49413B7E=======
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-avg=cert; x-avg-checked=avg-ok-5BD05D29
Content-Disposition: inline


---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Unless you're using Norton Antivirus.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.417 / Virus Database: 233 - Release Date: 08/11/02

--=======49413B7E=======--