Pentagon Plans to Deploy Journalists in Iraq
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon, in a departure from recent policy, is planning to deploy hundreds of print reporters, photographers and television journalists with front-line U.S. units if there is a war with Iraq.
Faced with the churn of 24/7 news and the prospect that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will mount an effective media campaign of his own, Pentagon officials have concluded that reporters "embedded" with units will be more credible witnesses to history than military briefers.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke won't say yet how often, for how long and with what units reporters might be deployed -- although she says the Pentagon is contemplating attaching them to air as well as ground troops, and in the "first wave" of any attack.
"We are absolutely convinced the more news and information that comes out of Iraq -- if there's military action -- the better off we'll all be," Clarke said. "It's fine for Torie Clarke to stand up there and say we went to extraordinary lengths to avoid hitting civilians. It is a far better thing for a bona fide, credible source of information -- the news media -- to be saying that based on experience."
The new media strategy is an acknowledgment by the Pentagon that winning the war of words and images is crucial to the mission in Iraq. But it is also a concession that the post-Vietnam arrangement for war coverage -- which relied largely on tightly controlled pools of reporters sending back copy for their briefing-bound colleagues -- hasn't worked for either journalists or, in some sense, the military.
"This represents a shift away from what we saw following Vietnam -- that whole philosophy of keeping the press away from the battlefield except in the most highly controlled manner," said Clarence R. Wyatt, a history professor at Centre College in Kentucky and author of "Paper Soldiers," a book about Vietnam War coverage. "We had examples of pool coverage in Grenada and Panama, and then that philosophy came to full flower in the Gulf War. Absolutely, this is an improvement."
It isn't unprecedented for the Pentagon to plant journalists among combat troops. And these reporters wouldn't be the only source of news -- media outlets still plan to send journalists to cover an Iraq war independent of the military, and to cover the briefings expected out of Qatar. But the new policy may put more reporters with troops in battle than in any war since World War II, when reporters wore the uniforms of the units they covered and wrote stories, a la Ernie Pyle, glorifying the heroism of individual soldiers.
