Media and the Military, Research Paper Example

Abstract

This paper contains the results of my survey of the media and its relations with Coalition Forces during operations Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom.  The purpose was to determine how the media in the military typically compromises operational security. I limited the scope of the investigation to four kinds of security compromises the media has been perceived to be guilty of: 1) divulging intelligent reports; 2) releasing classified mission facts; 3) reporting causalities before official notification; and 4) sensationalizing reported subjects. My thesis was that the media was repeatedly and obviously guilty of these compromises. My conclusion does not fully confirm that thesis.

The Media and the Military from the Gulf Wars to Afghanistan

It has been said that the essence of successful warfare is secrecy, and the essence of successful journalism is publicity. In this paper I researched the validity of that seemingly obvious idea, using four perceived ways that the Western media has compromised warzone security from 1990 to the present. My conclusion is that while there are indeed a few examples of three of those violations of security, the problem is more complex than my thesis assumed.

A Defining Incident

Equating journalism with political disloyalty and helping the enemy has been around since at least the American Civil War (Holzer, 2011). The list of then-President Lincoln’s offenses against Union journalists, editors, and newspaper offices is a long and alarming counterpoint to his hagiographic image. But there was pushback too. In 1864, Edward Crapsey, war correspondent for the Philadelphia Enquirer, was arrested by the commander of the Army of the Potomac after Crapsey published a story critical of him. After a night in jail and now with a placard around his neck announcing “Libeler of the Press”, Crapsey, mounted backwards on a “sorry looking” mule, was drummed out to the tune of The Rogue’s March. Back in Washington, his colleagues decided never to mention that commander’s name in their stories except in the context of defeat, ending his political ambitions (Williams, 2003). Which is why, at least until Ken Burns’ film The Civil War, generations following the Battle of Gettysburg knew that General Robert E. Lee had lost, but few could remember the name of the general who hadn’t.

Fast forward to 2003: retired U.S. Army General Clark, attributing the Army’s “Vietnam mentality” for restricting press coverage during Desert Storm, stated one result: “We had a 1st Armored Division tank battle that was just incredible, perhaps the biggest armored battle ever, but not a single image was reported or documented for history by the press” (Miracle, 2003).

Four Alleged Media-Made Compromises to Security

There are four basic charges of security violations made against the media when the subject of reporting the Gulf and Afghan wars is addressed, specifically that journalists: 1) divulged intelligent reports; 2) released classified mission facts; 3) reported causalities before official notification; and 4) sensationalized reported subjects. Working chronologically, I looked for examples of each of these four offenses during the Gulf Wars of Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom; and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

Desert Storm

Both Desert Storm and its precursor Desert Shield ushered in the start of a new era in media-military relations in the warzone: the embedded but uncensored (and initially restricted, in the Army’s case) journalist. Ending about two years before the Internet began its rapid rise in popularity, Desert Storm was called the “CNN war” due to that network’s ability to provide satellite-fed battlefield images to the world 24 hours a day — and “the world” included Saddam Hussein and his commanders in the field. That wide audience gave some journalists tremendous power and freedom. Non-embedded CNN correspondents Peter Arnett,  Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, known as “the Boys of Baghdad”, were able to continuously report on what they saw from the roof of Al-Rashid Hotel in the heart of Baghdad as the invasion began, and then later throughout the war zone. The Iraqis’ gave them remarkable latitude to tour, interview, and report — a fact that gave their stories a coloration of propaganda almost by definition, at least to official coalition eyes. It did not help that the reports came from behind enemy lines with the onscreen message that the footage was Cleared by Iraqi Censors. The U.S. government also disliked much of the CNN’s footage because it contradicted the “message” about smart bombs and guided cruise-missiles, the use of which is predicated on their pin-point accuracy and reduced civilian casualties.  In contrast to that, CNN’s on-the-scene footage showed that such bombs and missiles were still quite capable of inaccuracy, whether from bad targeting information, bad luck, technological limitations, or all three. For this defining coverage of America’s first major battle initiative since Desert Shield, the only charge of the four listed that might be applicable to Arnett and his colleagues would be #1, and #4) , the former modified to include reports of information that would have been in future classified intelligence reports.

There are two specific reports that deserve consideration of meeting one of the four charges. The first, again by Peter Arnett (a New Zealander whose government was a part of Desert Storm’s coalition forces), became known as the Baby Milk Factory incident. That factory was bombed by U.S. forces on January 23, 1991, who claimed that it had been converted to the production of bio-weapons. Arnett, having visited the factor some months before, countered that the factory produced milk-formula for babies. This produced a vituperative response from the White House, which all but accused Arnett of treason, noting that everything he said about the factory had been approved by the Iraqis. General Colin Powell reiterated that the factory produced biological weapons. Arnett remained firm, and shortly after the bombing other sources contradicted the U.S. position, including two technicians (New Zealanders themselves) who had worked there. The plant’s main contractor said it had produced infant formula since its construction in 1979. In 1992, an Arab businessman with no sympathies to Saddam Hussein and who knew the factory well, reported confidentially to the U.S. State Department that the factory had only produced the formula and nothing else, and had no secret rooms or facilities. A visit to the long-closed factory in 2003 by the Iraq Survey Group was inconclusive, and to this day the issue has not been resolved. The military would probably have liked to indict the media for this story under charge #4, above. In WWII, this charge probably would have stuck, since in that war essentially all news reportage was censored by the government, with truth, as in all previous wars, the first casualty, sacrificed to the goal of winning and keeping public opinion on the government’s side. But the cause is not so simple today, nor was it in 1991. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to justify the accusation, never mind the conviction.

The next incident is open and shut for conviction under charge #2. A story, published in the New York Times in February of 1991, disclosed critical tactical information, diagrams included, on an invasion maneuver called the “Hail Mary”, six days before the tactic was successfully used (Lafferty, Haywood, Klincar, Montheith & Strednansky, 1994). If the Iraqis had reacted to this leak, it likely would have resulted in a significant defeat or high casualties for coalition forces. For unknown reasons, the Iraqis either ignored the report or never processed it. (Some suspect the latter, as a case of informational overload.) As I will discuss below, the author of this story, Michael Gordon, who is today the chief military correspondent for the Times, generated even more notoriety of another kind in 2002.

Operation Iraqi Freedom

In this, the second phase of the Gulf Wars and much longer than the first, the Army changed its tune to match that of the Marine Corps, which from the beginning of Desert Storm had shown a “flair for public relations that made the reporters wonder whether they came from the same country that produced the Army” (Miracle, 2003).  In the process, the Army discovered that “When journalists were provided access, the accurate story was told. When they were not provided with information, the result was speculation, misinformation, and inaccuracy.” Most embedded journalists had no incentive to compromise operational security because they were increasingly not only on the front lines themselves, but were psychologically a part of a combat team. As one reporter said, “When you’re living in tents with these guys and eating what they eat and cleaning the dirt off the glasses, it’s a whole different experience. You definitely have a concern about knowing people so well that you sympathize with them.”  Probably for that reason, there were only a few important breaches of security. Regarding charge #2, in 2003, the un-embedded media-star Geraldo Rivera was de-accredited and sent home for reporting troop movements, apparently by drawing his location in the sand during a report, thus divulging information strictly controlled by the military. For charge #4, there is another open and shut case. In 2003, Los Angeles Times reporter Brian Walski photoshopped two battlefield pictures into one, thus improving the visual composition. The result did not affect the subject matter or constitute an attempt at propaganda, but he was nevertheless fired by his employer, independently of any government pressure, as a warning to anyone who would neglect fidelity in the cause of a message beyond that contained in the photo itself, thus weakening the credibility of reporting. But note that the same alert viewers that noticed a tell-tale duplication in the Times’ picture would have done the same thing in the same kind of government-released photo as well. Had such viewers been members of the warzone media, would that have fallen  into category #4 as well?

In another kind of case touching upon charge #1, Michael Gordon, the New York Times  reporter noted above, co-authored (with Times reporter Judith Miller) a story reporting on the Bush Administration’s claim that “Saddam Hussein has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.” In the story, Gordon accepted, apparently uncritically, various unnamed sources used to substantiate the claim. The implication is that Gordon and Miller were either used by, or allowed themselves to be used by, the President and his political operatives in the White House and the intelligence community to lend political support for another invasion of Iraq, in the process using sources that had leaked classified information themselves. Such charges have been made against Gordon’s colleague Judith Miller repeatedly, and together they both have been increasingly seen as tools that the Bush White House used to control much of the news about the Iraq war through the pages of the New York Times. The leaking of such information is of course a staple of Washington political power plays. It invites questions as to what extent that charges #1 and #2 against the media are actually indications of a more systemic form of power corruption that can’t fairly be charged against the media without equally charging members of the U.S. government, including (and perhaps especially) the intelligence community. The defining example of this corruption can be seen in an incident that involved the justification for even starting another war in Iraq in the first place, an incident now known as Plamegate. It is listed as Number Four on Time magazine’s Top Ten list of leaks (“Top ten leaks,” 2010).

For reasons of space I can only outline this case, in its way almost as hydra-headed as the Watergate scandal. It ultimately involved then-President George Bush, his Chief of Staff  Karl Rove; Vice President Dick Cheney; his Chief of Staff  Lewis “Scooter” Libby; Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; CIA agent Valeria Plame; her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson; the powerful fixture of Washington journalism, Robert Novak; and famed Watergate journalist Bob Woodward. In brief, agent Plame was exposed as an undercover CIA agent by Novak after Armitage informed him and Woodward of Plame’s identity as a CIA operative. Armitage did this not knowing that Plame was a covert operative as well, and this turned out to be a key point. It was speculated that the motivation for this exposure was to punish Plame’s husband Joseph Wilson for writing a series of op-ed New York Times pieces in July of 2003 that directly contradicted a claim made by President Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union Address, specifically that Iraq was actively engaged in trying to purchase uranium from Niger for the purpose of building a nuclear bomb. It was this claim that formed one of the chief justifications for invading Iraq. The end result was a black eye for Bush, as it turned out that Wilson was correct in his article and that Bush, although not having knowingly lied, passed on to the nation information that had not been confirmed and that the CIA had repeatedly tried to keep out of his speech. It was also a black eye for the nation, as Plame was now unable to continue the work she had been trained to do, in the process undercutting the nation’s ability to ensure its other operatives that their identities would be protected. This episode can definitely be viewed as a case of charges #1 and  #2: These reports were not directly related to any specific battlefield security, but were indirectly related to the security of battlefields the leaks led to.

Another clear and dramatic instance is the so-called Collateral Murder video, taken from cockpit gun-sight footage aboard two Army Apache helicopters on July 27, 2007, and released on Wikileaks in 2010. (Wikileaks, the online publisher of classified documents submitted by anonymous sources, began in 2006, and is cited further below.) It showed the helicopters’ machine-gun attack on a group of presumed insurgents in the street, two of whom turned out to be unarmed (albeit non-embedded) Reuters journalists. (Reuters requested this footage in 2007 but was denied access.) But Wikileaks can’t be called the “media” in the traditional sense of that word.  An additional complication is that the source of the leak was apparently an Army intelligence analyst, who has since been arrested and is still being held, having been charged with multiple offenses. However, Wikileaks did entitle the footage Collateral Murder, a blatant editorial interpretation, and provided an edited version that critics claimed put an unfair spin on what was an intense combat situation; so in another sense it can be viewed as a security breach and sensationalism: offenses  #2 and #4. But we are left with the question what is “the media”? This is a question that is steadily becoming harder to answer since the advent of the Web.

The role of more mainline news agencies in the propagation of apparently damaging material can be seen in the case of Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera. Although Americans have since accepted it, Al Jazeera was initially seen as essentially an Arab-world propaganda outlet directed against the U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan military missions, mainly due to its practice of broadcasting terrorist/suicide/resistance-fighters’ videos as news as soon as they were released. In 2004, its news coverage was called “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” To the extent that this perception of Al Jazeera’s coverage was seen to be true, then it could have been considered a case of offense #4. However, no serious observers would make such a charge today. Indeed even Mr. Rumsfeld has since become publically reconciled to the network.

A much more clear-cut offense arose in 2004, when the British Daily Mirror published a memo purportedly of a discussion between then-President George Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair that quoted Bush’s suggestion that Aljazeera’s Qatar and other offices be bombed. The accuracy of the quote was denied by the White House and never was fully determined. Nevertheless, two British civil servants were charged with leaking the memo under an Official Secrets Act. This is makes it an instance of charge #1. And although the memo did not detail the specific details of an actual classified mission (charge #2), it might have had some referential connection with two earlier, actual U.S. bombings of Al Jazeera’s offices, in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2001; and in Baghdad in 2003, the latter of which killed a reporter onsite.

Operating Enduring Freedom

This second part of the Gulf Wars began in October 2001, and was still being conducted when President Obama took office in 2009. The story of that war’s most important (or at least most famous) media-fed security leaks would seem to fall under charge #1 and #2. In July of 2010, Wikileaks released 77,000 classified documents relating to the Iraq and Afghan wars. According to Time (which rated that and a follow-up October leak of 391,832  documents as Number 1 on its Top Ten list) the initial batch consisted of frank intelligence reports from troops in the field revealing high rates of civilian casualties (information that would possibly have had the effect of increasing the effort to minimize those casualties in the future, efforts that might cause higher military casualties). What is interesting though is that Julian Assange, the director of Wikileaks, first made the documents available to mainline news outlets like New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel, apparently to heighten the news value of the leaks themselves by allowing experienced journalists to comb through the documents for headline-value material. But what is even more interesting is that  Assange’s avowed goal of making the U.S. look uniquely bad, backfired. Instead, commentators and foreign government spokespersons noted how often the documents make the U.S. look good. One such individual even accused the U.S. of orchestrating the leaks just to achieve that end. On the whole, international reaction was and remains muted. Said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “In my conversations at least one of my counterparts said to me, ‘Well, don’t worry about it, you should see what we say about you.’”
Eight months later Time magazine’s seventh most important leak, (offense #1 here), took place: the release of General Stanley McChrystal’s war needs for Afghanistan. McChrystal, head of coalition forces, wrote a report to President Obama that the Afghan war would be lost without a significant change in strategy, which included more troops. Bob Woodward, again the Washington Post reporter, got 66 pages of the report and posted them on the paper’s website, and it looked like McChrystal or one of his staff was responsible for the leak — it wasn’t a case of Woodward hacking into a computer, sneaking into an office, or bribing a contact. The upshot of the release was that nearly all of the general’s war-requests were granted. The leak turned out to serve the military’s immediate needs in Afghanistan, and perhaps the nation’s longer-term needs well, at least in that theater. Yet it is also another example of how those in power will use the media to their own ends, as was seen when leakers, apparently from somewhere in the U.S. government, released the name of the Pakistani doctor who had had helped the U.S. track down Bin Laden. Pakistan charged that individual with treason and sentenced him to 33 years imprisonment. The motivation for that specific leak and others (such as that British intelligence had planted a double agent in a group planning another “underwear bomb”) is obscure. It may be a desire to establish bona fides with a reporter in order to ensure that reporter is available for future use, or even as a maneuver to distract reporters from even deeper secrets.  It may also reflect the expectation that any given hot and topical secret is bound to be leaked anyway, so one might as well be the first to either leak it or report it. Competition starts coming into play.

General McChrystal found out at firsthand the double-edged nature of working with a journalist to air one’s point of view. His career was ended after his extended interview with Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings. Although the story, entitled The Runaway General, was not a leak in the traditional sense, it did lead to accusations in an Army Times story that Hastings had violated much of the interview’s off-the-record setting, and that the most controversial remarks had been made by McChrystal’s junior staff. If so, then parts of that interview would certainly justify charges #4 and perhaps even a case of charge #2.

Charges #1 and #2 can be more or less combined and then turned inside out, as in the case of when the media and government conspire to suppress the news. This occurred in one (known) notable instance in the case of David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban in Pakistan in 2008 and held for over seven months. The Times convinced virtually every major news outlet — including NPR, Al Jazeera, and Wikipedia — not to reveal the kidnapping, fearing that news of the event would endanger Rohde’s life even more. Remarkable, the effort was entirely successful. Yet the very success of the blackout troubled some other journalists, who wondered what other events had been hidden or would be hidden. Finally, there is the case of the author of No Easy Day.  A Navy Seal, he based his book, authored under the pen name Mark Owen, on his personal participation in the killing of Osama Bin Laden. While Fox News and the Associated Press revealed the author’s true name, 60 Minutes, concluding an interview with Owen, specifically declined to do so. Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, who himself publically confirmed reports about the CIA’s use of the Pakistani doctor in the hunt for Bin Laden, now claimed that Owen’s book contained confidential information and should not have been published. So who was the most guilty of offenses #2 and #4 in this case — Owen the Navy Seal, his publisher, or the media?

Regarding charge #3, which applies to coalition casualties rather than civilian dead, the genesis of this charge probably lies in the news blackout of photographs and broadcast coverage of the arrival stateside of combat dead in their coffins. It was imposed by then-President H.W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Dick Cheney with the start of hostilities during Desert Storm. It lasted until President Obama rescinded it in 2009. The idea that the media violated it may have begun during a press conference H.W. Bush gave during the operation to capture Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989. As Bush chatted and joked, all three TV networks split their screens and showed the simultaneous return of American combat dead from that operation. However, an extensive search on the Web using numerous search-terms turns up no instances where embedded U.S. and foreign journalists, or stateside outlets, deliberately or repeatedly violated the ban while it lasted, although the latter certainly protested the ban, as did some members of Congress. There probably were unscripted violations. Warbloggers also probably posted casualties known to them in the warzone, but are warbloggers “the media”? Thus, charge #3 does seem to be something of a military urban-legend. If there have been significant such breaches, it is unlikely that they could be considered breaches of operational security.

Conclusion

When I began this paper, my assumption was that its thesis — that the media in the military compromises operational security — was obviously true. What I found was that it isn’t necessarily true. I discuss numerous specific incidents from the Gulf Wars to Afghanistan, yet the only arguable cases of dangerously one-sided intent to violate the rules are the “Hail Mary” plan; Geraldo Rivera’s sketch in the sand; the doctored photograph; and the Apache footage. All the rest are hopelessly colored by the intent of the sources of the leaks; or, in the case of the first CNN reports and the Baby Milk Factory incident, were arguably legitimate news stories.

In wartime, one perception is that embedded journalists should be fully allied with the presentation of a unified message to the public back at home. But that means leaks can’t come from the government either. In World War II,  the U.S. armed forces inducted its battlefield journalists into their officer ranks and subjected them to formal censorship. There were no home-front leaks, or at least no published ones like today. We have seen that civilian journalists can still be persuaded to withhold a story, but in the end, journalists today must be willing to serve another master: to get as much information as possible and publish it if doing so would be at all newsworthy, regardless of consequences. That can lead to leaks that would be treason were the journalists in uniform. And only then could the leaks from the government be suppressed. But those days are over. For better or for worse, the more free we are, the more risks we take.

This paper shows that the majority of leaks must be viewed as two-sided affairs. The media reveals the secret to the public, but needs someone to whisper the secret first. Perhaps the best explanation is to compare the media with our legal system, where guilt or innocence is determined in a competition between two sides, the goal usually being victory for its own sake. Be it a conviction, an acquittal, or a scoop, as in war itself, who wins that competition is right.

References

Holzer, H. (2011, November 30). Abraham lincoln and the freedom of the press. Retrieved from http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/302992-1

Lafferty, B. D., Haywood, J. E., Klincar, T. D., Montheith, C. A., & Strednansky, S. E. (1994). The impact of media information on enemy effectiveness: a model for conflict. Proteus, A Journal of Ideas, Retrieved from www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/readings/media-laf.doc

Miracle, T. (2003). The army and embedded media. Military Review. Retrieved from http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/milreview/miracle.pdf

Top ten leaks. (2010). Time, Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2006558,00.html

Williams, E. (2003, June 20). A history of the inquirer. The Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20070219044935/http:/www.philly.com/mld/ inquirer/ news/local/6135296.htm?1c