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Friday, March 21, 2003

By Ron Weiskind and Nate Guidry, Post-Gazette Staff Writers

Just as the technology used to wage war in Iraq has changed significantly in the dozen years since Operation Desert Storm, so has the technology that television uses to cover the conflict.

	Access is not without risk. Journalists and hotel guests try to navigate a stairwell while looking through gas masks as they scramble for shelter yesterday in a Kuwait City hotel after four missiles were launched into Kuwait from Iraq. No injuries or damage was reported by the Kuwait Ministry of Defense. (Wally Santana, Associated Press)

Journalists embedded into military units heading into Iraq carry lightweight cameras to capture images they can transmit instantaneously with portable satellite dishes. They can report live via videophone and, when time allows, edit stories on their laptop computers and send them to the networks via e-mail.

During the 1991 Gulf War, in contrast, CNN got live pictures out of Iraq on the first night of the war because reporters Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett and John Holliman, later celebrated as "the boys in Baghdad," had the foresight to hook up a four-wire telephone that allowed them to describe the action from their hotel room.

Another change is that CNN no longer has the field of 24-hour news to itself. Fox News Channel and MSNBC are competing for stories and viewers.

While the advanced technology and multiple news sources offer the possibility of unprecedented access for viewers, they also pose different types of potential problems.

	Smoke and flames rise from the Iraqi Planning Ministry building in downtown Baghdad in an image televised live yesterday by NBC. (NBC via Associated Press)

"The only time in the United States that we could watch war live was during the Civil War, when people came out with picnic baskets to watch the battle of Bull Run," said Ron Yates, head of the department of journalism at the University of Illinois and a former Chicago Tribune reporter who covered Vietnam and other wars.

"There's always been a fascination with it. Now it's almost as if people are looking at it like a Hollywood production. People become disappointed when they don't get up close to the explosions. They want to see it even closer. I think eventually the technology will be available for it."

The military has placed restrictions on the embedded journalists. In exchange for the increased access, reporters agree to embargo live images and classified information during the moments, or even hours, precipitating action.

From a tactical perspective, Iraqi commanders watching CNN in their bunkers are denied TV's live intelligence of what's coming, while American news audiences get to see what just happened.

"The temporary news blackouts are a matter of the reporter's personal integrity," said Master Sgt. Steve Opet of the Army's 354th Mobile Public Affairs Attachment.

"If a reporter smuggles in a small communication device or leaks classified information, we have no way of stopping them. With the new process of training the media to be physically fit and keep up with their units and live along side them, I personally feel they're a part of the unit and you can trust them."

But whenever a reporter is placed in a competitive situation, the danger is that someone will rush a story onto the air, Yates said.

"It totally changes the model by which reportage usually happens," said Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University. "In the old days, journalists collected information. They would go back and submit that to an editorial process that would decide what merited being put into the paper, into the broadcast of whatever.

"Live coverage eliminates the editorial aspect. The data is being collected simultaneously as we're seeing it."

The problem is that even the reporter and the news anchor may not know exactly what we're seeing.

"You don't have a context yet. The only thing you can do is respond viscerally to the pictures." But when viewers respond emotionally to what they see without knowing the context, they may come away with an inaccurate view of events, he said.

But even if the newscasts don't intend to shape public opinion, the military has its own objectives.

"There's a very intense campaign on the part of the United States going on right now," said Michael Schoenfeld, vice chancellor for public affairs at Vanderbilt University and former Voice of America chief of staff during the first Gulf War.

"There are airplanes flying over Iraq right now with radio and television stations that are essentially taking over signals that are broadcasting within Iraq. It's like turning on your local radio station and instead of hearing KDKA, you're hearing the United States military radio."

Schoenfeld said Iraq is probably one of the most intensely busy places for information on Earth.

"Some Iraq citizens have access to satellite dishes and the Internet, and that information gets cycled around," he said. "So what's coming into the country from the outside and what's being disseminated from the inside makes for a lot of information floating around."

Schoenfeld said there's several kinds of propaganda at work.

"White propaganda is the overt kind that we know about," he said. "Everything from the Voice of America and Radio Sawa and Radio Free Iraq. There are also broadcasts that comes from the military, as well as other countries in the region."

Schoenfeld said there is also something called "black propaganda," which is designed to look like it is coming from someone else.

"There's no doubt that some of that is taking place in Iraq now," he said. "There may be newscasts that purport to be from dissidents within the Iraq's military that are saying, 'Lay down your arms and don't fight for a losing cause.'"

There's also "gray propaganda" which is everything in between, he said.

"I don't think anyone thinks a single broadcast, leaflets and pictures will compel someone to change their mind," he said. "But the totality of it creates enough to make someone concerned."

There is concern, too, about the differences between the media in Arab countries and in the United States.

"Media outlets in Arab countries are primarily controlled, although there have been some improvements recently," said Mohammad A. Auwal, associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Los Angeles. "One of its roles is to interpret and amplify the interpretations of the government."

But Auwal said the same could be true of American journalists whose coverage of the war in Iraq is being parroted from the Pentagon.

"It's ridiculous," he said. "The journalists are not asking tough questions. National Public Radio has become Pentagon radio. The American media can and should be more responsible."

Post-Gazette staff writer John Hayes contributed to this report.

Ron Weiskind can be reached at rweiskind@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1581. Nate Guidry can be reached at nguidry@post-gazette.com or 412-263-3865.