Author: Ronald Brownstein
Publication: The Times of India
Date: October 13, 2001
If history is any guide, the daily
briefings from defence secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld could prove an imperfect
portrait of the unfolding war in Afghanistan.
No one has yet accused Mr Rumsfeld
of misleading the news media or misrepresenting events on the ground. But
postmortems on previous American wars routinely found that the government
exaggerated its successes and minimised its setbacks in its public presentations;
indeed the tendency to embroider has been documented back to the Civil
War.
At moments of national crisis, officials
in Washington have on occasion made statements they knew were flat untrue
- the way President Ike Eisenhower did in describing the U-2 spy plane
shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 as a weather research plane. President
Richard Nixon hid a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia for more than
a year, even falsifying reports sent to the Senate. More often, officials
in wartime have given the news media and public a partial picture meant
to portray events in the best possible light, analysts say.
Over time, that instinct has produced
inflated accounts of enemy soldiers killed in Vietnam, Iraqi Scud missiles
intercepted in the Persian Gulf War and Serbian tanks destroyed in Kosovo.
"Most of the time, the problem in briefings is not that there is some blatant
mistruth being uttered," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the non-partisan
Project for Excellence in Journalism. "It's that what you are getting is
a very selective thing that is designed to accentuate the positive."
This tendency to highlight good
news can reflect legitimate disagreements about how to interpret ambiguous
intelligence information on the tight deadlines that daily briefings impose,
experts say. It may spring from a reluctance to release any information
that could prove comforting to the enemy - a factor that could have been
a motivation in the inflated accounts of the Patriot missile's success
in downing Scud warheads during the Gulf War. But critics warn this dynamic
can also reflect the urge to only report results that maximise public support
for the war effort particularly in cases like this, where few reporters
can challenge the Pentagon's portrayal through independent access to the
battlefield.
"Flat-out lies have occurred but
are probably less the problem. Far more numerous are cases of deception,
dishonesty and withholding of information," says Michael Sherry, an historian
at Northwestern University. So far, most observers say Mr Rumsfeld has
been circumspect in his claims of success; in one briefing this week, he
acknowledged that "the cruise missiles and bombers are not going to solve
this problem." Mr Rumsfeld has also pledged not to lie to the public, although
he has refused, on some occasions, to answer questions he considered inappropriate.
Throughout history, truth has been
a scarce enough commodity during military conflict that senator Hiram Johnson
famously described it as "the first casualty" of wartime. For almost as
long as Americans have gone to war, the military and the news media have
engaged in their own hostilities over the quantity, and accuracy, of information
provided.
As far back as the Civil War, secretary
of war Edwin M. Stanton personally altered casualty figures before releasing
them, reducing the number of men General Ulysses S. Grant lost in one engagement
by two-thirds, reported Phillip Knightley in his book The First Casualty,
a classic history of war reporting.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the flamboyant
commander of U.S. forces in Southwest Asia during World War II, was a particular
offender. "His news releases bore so little resemblance to what was actually
happening that they aroused resentment among the troops," wrote Knightley.
But veracity was enough of a problem in Vietnam that the notion of a "credibility
gap" between the government and the public was first born in the military's
daily Saigon briefings.
Over time, the daily briefings became
known as the "five o'clock follies" - a label that underscores what little
stock reporters put in their accuracy. To a considerable extent, the briefings
"were bedeviled by the problem" of precisely describing the state of "an
unconventional war," wrote Peter Braestrup, the former Washington Post
Saigon bureau chief in Big Story, his study of the media during Vietnam.
The televised daily briefings now conducted by Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard
B. Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, represent the Pentagon's
best thinking about how to close the credibility gap that opened in Vietnam.
The tradition of using top officials
to brief on a war's progress began during the Gulf War, when 24-hour cable
television made it possible for senior commanders such as Gen, H. Norman
Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia, and then-defence secretary Dick Cheney in
Washington to reach the public directly. As Mr Cheney explained after the
war, the daily briefings allowed him "to manage the information flow" without
the "filter" of the media. Coupled with severe restrictions on media access
to the battlefield, that model proved so successful at solidifying public
support for the Gulf War that it was followed by the Clinton administration
in Kosovo, and so far by the Bush administration in Afghanistan.
In each instance, the administration
made the highest officials available as the principal source of information
in effect, making them the face of war.
In other cases, the military may
withhold information that could endanger operations or provide useful intelligence
to the enemy. But the explanation for inaccuracies in briefings isn't always
so benign, says Jacqueline Sharkey, a professor of journalism at the University
of Arizona and author of a recent book on relations between the military
and the press. The perennial problem, she says, is when briefings go "beyond
trying to control information that would affect operational security and
troop safety and (try) to control political perceptions and public opinion
about the decision to go to war." (LAT- WP Svc)
