War of Words

PETER ONUF: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And today we’re looking at this seesaw between free speech and censorship in American history. We’re going to end the show today with a few of press censorship during war.

In many military conflicts, censorship was routine and often transparent. During World War II, the government even opened an office of censorship to regulate news reports. But we’re going to fast forward 50 years when the Pentagon shifted tactics.

BRIAN BALOGH: In the fall of 1990, Joe Galloway was gearing up to cover the First Gulf War for the US News and World Report. He was about to leave for Saudi Arabia when he received the Pentagon’s new set of rules for wartime journalists.

JOE GALLOWAY: The rules ran 36 pages, double-sided, small type. And if those rules were followed, you couldn’t cover anything or report anything.

BRIAN BALOGH: Galloway was shocked. He’d been a reporter during the Vietnam War when the military’s guidelines ran just one page.

JOE GALLOWAY: Vietnam, in fact, was the most openly and freely covered war in the history of our country.

BRIAN BALOGH: The Pentagon trusted reporters would not reveal any information that might compromise national security. There were no military censors.

JOE GALLOWAY: Movement was never limited for me. I went wherever I wanted to go and generally was welcomed at the other end by the shoulders that I was covering.

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BRIAN BALOGH: Dan Hallin, a communications professor at UC San Diego, says this press freedom created a myth by the end of the Vietnam War.

DAN HALLIN: I mean there’s different versions of this idea that the US lost the war in Vietnam because it lost its will to win. And that was the responsibility of the media, that was due to media coverage of the war. That’s a view that developed after the war.

BRIAN BALOGH: Galloway insists the press never had that much influence.

JOE GALLOWAY: I wish that I could have written a story so powerful that it would have driven us out of that war, in which case there would only be 1,100 names on that black granite wall in Washington DC instead of 58,290. What really turned public opinion in Vietnam was not what they saw on television and on the evening news. What it was was an absolutely endless flow of bright, shiny aluminum body containers flying home to every little town in America.

BRIAN BALOGH: But Hallin says the myth became conventional wisdom within the Pentagon. When the US military started planning for the next wars–

DAN HALLIN: They took the attitude that media coverage inevitably means the decline of public support for a war. And therefore, you have to restrict the media as much as possible.

ED AYERS: And so during the First Gulf War, the Pentagon relied on press pools, small groups of journalists who were granted permission to cover the same event. And the US military decided where to send those journalists.

DAN HALLIN: And for the most part, the pools were not sent to where the fighting was actually going on. So most journalists had the experience that they missed that war essentially, that they were back in a hotel and not where actual fighting was going on.

ED AYERS: As a result, reporters found themselves censored ahead of time.

DAN HALLIN: I mean if the journalists can’t get there to record the story to begin with, then you don’t even need to censor them, because they don’t have anything substantial to report.

ED AYERS: And there was enough a problem with the pool system. Even journalists who got good access to combat zones still lived in the shadow of Vietnam. John Fialka, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal during the Gulf War recalls reporters with access to a military helicopter during battle. They witnessed the army flanking maneuver that would ultimately decide the war.

JOHN FIALKA: And they got back to an airfield where they found one phone. And there’s a line of soldiers calling home to say, hi, mom, I’m OK. And the officer in charge of minding the reporters decided to put them in the back of the line, first telling them how much he hated reporters. There is just a lot of sort of gratuitous hatred spewing out of a war that happened 20 years previously.

And the end, a lot of the copy, a lot of the videotape, a lot of pictures got delayed to the point where nobody ever saw it.

ED AYERS: Fialka says the news business is like the milk business. It has to be fresh. Editors would likely dump reports of three-day-old battles.

JOHN FIALKA: The news of the war is the first draft of history. If the first draft has big holes in it or is censored or whatever, then you have tampered with your own history.

ED AYERS: And when the Pentagon went back to review these first drafts of the history, military officials noticed something missing, namely the war.

JOE GALLOWAY: You know, I went to conferences after the war where they put the generals on one side of the table and us on the other. And one of the generals started complaining. And I said where your pool journalists. He said, oh, I locked them up in the rear at headquarters and didn’t bring them forward.

And I said, and now you’re complaining you have no film of your great successes on the battlefield. Whose fault is it?

ED AYERS: Determined to learn from their mistake, the Pentagon sought a new strategy for wars that were to follow.

BRIAN BALOGH: The solution was the embed system, which attached reporters to military units inside combat zones. It gave more journalists more access than press pools. Embedded journalists in military units also kept them safe in increasingly dangerous war zones.

Most news organizations have depended on the system since the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Still, Hallin notes that the embed system is simply another form of censorship, rather than a return to the open coverage of Vietnam.

DAN HALLIN: Most news organizations were aware that the policy of embedding was good at giving them access but would give them a limited view of what was actually going on, because they would be accompanying US troops, and they’d be reporting things essentially from the point of view of US troops.

BRIAN BALOGH: And those limits matter in a democracy. Fialka says that the press needs to be able to record on a war as freely and openly as possible.

JOHN FIALKA: The public pays billions of dollars for these episodes. And they should understand how they work and how they don’t work. And it really is in the military’s interest to get the truth out there, because they’re representing a country that puts a great deal of value in the First Amendment.

BRIAN BALOGH: John Fialka helped us tell that story. He was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of Hotel Warriors, Covering the Gulf War. We also heard from Joe Galloway, who reported for United Press International and US News and World Report and is the author of We Were Soldiers Once and Young. And Daniel Hallin, professor at UC San Diego and author of The Uncensored War, the Media and Vietnam.