Senators Told of Press Curb Problems

U.S. military officers escorting reporters in the Persian Gulf should not even be “within eyeshot” during media interviews of soldiers, and they certainly “are not supposed to be hovering minders,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Pete Williams told a Senate committee Wednesday.

But those instructions are being violated, Williams acknowledged in testimony before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which was looking into Pentagon rules on media access to the Persian Gulf War.

Williams, who serves as the chief Pentagon spokesman, also said that these rules for escorts, unlike those governing the press, are not actually written down anywhere.

“They are rules of common sense, of rational reason,” said Williams, who insisted that the press rules are “working well.”

“A lot of rules of common sense are written down,” countered Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

Former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite said the main problem with the system is its emphasis on “pre-censorship . . . telling you what you can’t see. I’d rather have post-censorship, where you could argue it out after you get your story.”

Although 1,400 reporters are now accredited in Saudi Arabia, only 100 at a time are assigned to press pools, which must be escorted by military officers; through the first 35 days of war, only about half that many reporters were out with troops at any one time. Most of the rest remained at their hotels in Dhahran, and others remained in Riyadh, where the daily military briefing is held about 300 miles from the battlefront.

This system is making it impossible to know whether the version of the war Americans are receiving can be trusted as accurate, Cronkite said.

He suggested to the Senate panel that the number of accredited reporters be sharply limited, but that they be allowed to travel wherever and whenever they want with American troops, the local commanders in the field permitting. Then all stories would be submitted to a centralized military censor.

This was the system the American press used in World War II, and it had the advantage that reporters knew everything that was going on, even if they were censored from telling everything they knew. Thus, Cronkite said, the public could at least trust the accuracy of what they were being told.

One of the most influential military officials in shaping Pentagon thinking on press coverage had some criticism for both sides. Winant Sidle, a retired U.S. Army major general and a career public affairs officer who helped develop the press pool system now employed in the Gulf, urged the military to “loosen up a bit.”

And he criticized the media for sending too many reporters. “The media is asking for too much information. This is revealed in televised press briefings where many questions are asked that the military should not answer,” Sidle said.

“One of the most obvious is: ‘When will the ground attack begin?’ Stupid question.”