Front-row seats for the war

By STEVE GORMAN

Television viewers accustomed to watching war played out through high-altitude film of "smart bombs" might see something very different if the United States invades Iraq - live combat troops in action.

After tightly curbing news access to military operations in Grenada, the 1991 Gulf War and Afghanistan, the Pentagon plans to let journalists accompany front-line soldiers should US-led forces move in to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

The US Defence Department has even given "boot camp" training to prepare journalists for the rigours and hazards of working in a war zone where exposure to biological or chemical weapons is a possibility.

Broadcast news crews and their audiences also will benefit from improved communications gear, including satellite links, that is smaller and more portable than that of 12 years ago.

US television networks are generally enthusiastic about plans to "embed" American and foreign journalists with the US military's air, sea and land units, saying it marks a big step forward in relations between the Pentagon and news organisations.

Mindful that the American public is deeply sceptical about going to war, Pentagon officials have said it is in their interests to give Western reporters access to combat zones to counteract Iraqi views that could be distributed by Arab news outlets.

The Defence Department says journalists will be free to report on all aspects of the war, including civilian casualties and "friendly fire" incidents, without subjecting their stories to review or editing by military censors.

"It's a sea change of attitude in granting us access," said Robin Sproul, the Washington bureau chief for ABC News.

"It's a bold step, and I think they're serious about it. It should show the public a view of war that they haven't really seen before."

CBS News president Andrew Heyward said he saw the potential for a lot of live coverage and "for the public to see much more of this conflict than it did the last [the 1991 Gulf War]".

"It's not just the combat. It's also the experience of the troops, being able to speak to them, being able to be with them as they advance on Baghdad."

This would be a sharp contrast with the previous Gulf War, when images of the conflict consisted largely of Pentagon-supplied aerial film of "surgical" air strikes on enemy targets or generals pointing at maps in daily news briefings.

Some reporters and camera crews accompanied troops into the battlefield in "pools", but their film was often out of date by the time they were permitted to file their stories.

The few reporters who did strike out on their own did so at great risk. CBS correspondent Bob Simon was captured by Iraqi forces with three other members of his news team and held for 40 days in an Iraqi prison.

It is not known how much latitude "embedded" journalists assigned to combat units will have to move about independently within those units and within general areas of operation.

And it remains to be seen how close units with "embedded" journalists will get to the fighting.

"If it's a big-unit operation, journalists should have maximum freedom to cover the story without being restricted to pools that are overseen by military officers," said Steve Bell, a former Vietnam War correspondent for ABC News who now teaches broadcast journalism at Ball State University in Indianapolis.

In any event, he said, the result is certain to fall short of the freedom enjoyed by reporters in Vietnam, who were often free to roam the countryside and routinely hitched rides to the battlefront on US Army helicopters.

Graphic war film from Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s played a big part in undermining public support for that war, a lesson the military took to heart in subsequent conflicts.

Heyward said details about journalists' mobility would probably be left to field commanders. He and other network news executives acknowledged that the "embedding" plan carries certain trade-offs.

"Clearly you don't have the ability to file whenever you want to," NBC News vice-president Bill Wheatley said. "On the other hand, you do have the protection and mobility of the armed forces."

Network officials also said assigning reporters to military units would constitute only one element of their war overall coverage.

"It's an added resource," Heyward said.

Some experts said the plan to "embed" reporters in the armed forces raises questions about journalistic independence.

"I think the verb itself is enough to make journalists uncomfortable," said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Centre for the Study of Popular Television.

"It implies becoming part and parcel, and implies in a more glib way going to bed with."

Still, Thompson agreed news organisations and the public would probably be better served than they were in 1991.

"If the Gulf War looked like a video arcade, this might at least look a little bit more like what we think of as a war," he said.

Other critics have suggested the arrangement could fuel perceptions, particularly outside the United States, that American television covers the US military like the home-town football team.

Network news executives acknowledge that the Pentagon's latest overtures are in part self-motivated.

"You've got al-Jazeera and other Middle Eastern satellite news channels that will have reporters showing events from a perspective that is their own, and it serves the Pentagon well to have the independent voices of US media also observing events as close to the action as possible," said ABC's Sproul.

Heyward said ground rules established between the Pentagon and news organisations after the Gulf War were untested during the US-led war in Afghanistan.

That conflict "was so unusual and so much driven by special forces, that it really wasn't an appropriate laboratory for these new rules".

The degree to which the Pentagon makes good on its promise to allow coverage of the good, the bad and ugly in the next conflict remains to be tested.

"You can't speculate what it's going to be like," Heyward said. "They call it the fog of war for a reason."

- REUTERS

Herald feature: Iraq