Covering All Bases
Patriotism, objectivity, and the pursuit of journalism in wartime
Comedian Dennis Miller was in his element. It was last Tuesday night on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the bearded rant artist was taking aim at the press corps. "You always say that during this war it's the public's need to know about our ground forces," he said. "We don't want to know, OK?" Miller got the audience to join in: "We don't want to know!" they chanted. "It's not for us," said Miller. "It's for you and your cocktail chatter at parties in D.C. Leave our boys alone over there."
In what most working journalists call the biggest story of their lifetimes, the stakes have never seemed higher nor the dilemmas facing the press more serious. How much information should they report? Does the public's right to know outweigh secrecy and security? And perhaps most significantly, these days: Where does the press draw the line between patriotism and the pursuit of journalism? "Everyone in the media is struggling internally with reconciling this new kind of just war with the old rules of journalism," says Larry Sabato, author of Feeding Frenzy: Attack Journalism and American Politics. "The old rules say you have no opinion, you simply report the news and let others decide."
That's never been as simple as it might sound. Balanced reporting, after all, doesn't really mean that every story has two sides: If you interview a serial killer, you don't have to portray his justifications for the murders as an equally valid viewpoint. But it can mean bending over backward to understand other, seemingly alien, points of view. And in times of international conflict--particularly this one, which is arguably as much a war of words as a contest of military cunning--that gets mighty tough. In the wake of September 11, it's hard to show Osama bin Laden and his supporters as anything but, in President Bush's word, "evildoers." But dismissing them as madmen or anomalies, doesn't help the cause of patriotism or journalism. "Fairness in this case is trying to determine motives and trying to determine what is actually happening on the other side," says Sabato.
Look at the case of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Even if a war is just, the argument goes, we have a right to know if innocent people are dying as a result of U.S. military actions. But at this point, we don't even know the basic facts of the deaths. The Taliban have taken two groups of correspondents in to count bodies. Trying to get in front of the Taliban's reports, the White House recently set up a 24-hour international press operation to knock down the organization's claims. Who's telling the truth? "It's like shadowboxing," says Jane Kirtley, a professor of media law at the University of Minnesota. "You don't know what you don't know."
Modi operandi. So journalists try to read behind the lines--or not. Concerned that repeated accounts of alleged civilian casualties might seem unbalanced, CNN chief Walter Isaacson wrote in a staff memo: "We must redouble our efforts to make sure we do not seem to be reporting from [the Taliban's] vantage or perspective," he wrote. "We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how [they] have harbored terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people." But Reuters takes the position that unless the terrorist connections are proved, the events of September 11 can be called only "attacks" or "suicide attacks," not terrorism.
Since the attacks, American media organizations have taken steps to support the government. The White House press corps abandoned its practice of giving details of the president's travel schedule ahead of time. The networks acceded to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's request not to broadcast prerecorded statements made by Osama bin Laden without screening them first. And though at least 17 news organizations knew in advance when the air campaign would begin, they didn't report it.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration has been quietly putting a lid on information. Attorney General John Ashcroft warned government agencies to "carefully consider" threats to national security before releasing records under the Freedom of Information Act. And a number of federal agencies have scrubbed their Web sites clean of information that could conceivably prove helpful to terrorists. The Pentagon has kept tighter reins on the media's access both to operations and to senior military commanders than in any other recent conflict, including the Gulf War. While reporters are currently aboard two U.S. aircraft carriers participating in Operation Enduring Freedom and others have entered Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, most must rely on briefings thousands of miles from the war zone.
That's unlikely to change. Rumsfeld recently foreclosed the hope media organizations had held out for placing reporters on the USS Kitty Hawk, where some special operations missions are based. And last week, he decided against putting correspondents in rear areas such as Uzbekistan, where sensitivity to the American presence there is already high. "This administration has been very protective of information since Day 1," says NBC White House correspondent Campbell Brown. After somebody tipped off reporters to the October 19 paratroop raid by Rangers inside Afghanistan--while it was still going on--Rumsfeld was said to be furious. "It just floors me that people are willing to do that," he said at a press briefing. U.S. News has learned that Rumsfeld's staff has quietly begun a hunt for the perpetrator, who they believe works on the prestigious staff of the Joint Chiefs. In the endless tug of war between the press and the government, some things never change.
With Richard J. Newman and Mark Mazzetti
This story appears in the November 19, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.