How Reporters Missed the War

By STANLEY W. CLOUD

When Allied troops stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944, American correspondents and photographers were on hand to tell the story. But two weeks ago, when U.S. Marines and Rangers led the charge into Panama as part of Operation Just Cause, not a single journalist accompanied them. The Pentagon- sanctioned pool of reporters did not arrive on the scene until four hours after the fighting began, and they were unable to file their first dispatches until six hours after that. Worse, the initial pool report shed almost no light on the confused military situation, leading off with the hardly titanic news that the U.S. charge d'affaires in Panama, John Bushnell, was worried about the "mischief" that deposed dictator Manuel Noriega could cause. Complains pool member Steven Komarow of the Associated Press: "We kind of missed the story."

Responsibility for that failure lies with the military -- particularly the Defense Department's Southern Command -- not with Komarow or his seven colleagues in the pool. From the time the hastily summoned reporters arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on the night of the invasion until they returned from Panama four days later, the Army kept them under such tight control that journalistic initiative was all but impossible.

During their first, crucial day in Panama, the reporters were kept for several hours in a windowless room at Fort Clayton and treated to a tedious, history-laden briefing. Nor were things much better once the poolers were allowed into the sunlight. "To the extent we got any news at all," Komarow says, "it was pretty much by accident." He notes, for example, that the pool did witness looting in Panama City, but only when their military driver lost his way. Exposure to actual combat was also a matter of chance, as when Noriega forces attacked the Southern Command's headquarters, about 400 yards from the press center.

"It was a Keystone Kops operation, especially at first," says Kevin Merida of the Dallas Morning News. "The military seemed to have no concept of what our role was. The whole first day was devoted to taking us to places where the action was already over. It was like forming a White House pool and then showing them an empty hall and saying, 'This is where the President spoke.' "

Acrimony between the press and the military is hardly new. It existed even during the fondly recalled days of World War II, when correspondents had to wear uniforms and submit to censorship, a practice the military abandoned in Viet Nam and has avoided since. In response to criticism over the barring of reporters from the 1983 Grenada invasion, the Pentagon created a National Media Pool of rotating news organizations. The military not only decides when a pool will be "activated" and "deactivated" but also sets the ground rules for participation, including understandably strict limits on what information can be published before an operation begins. Moreover, it allows the local commands to exercise almost complete control over the movements of participating reporters and photographers and acts as a traffic cop for the transmission of copy and the shipment of film and videotape.

That is a price many experienced journalists are willing to pay if it means getting into a place that would otherwise be closed to them. "Bad as the pool operation was in Panama," says Carl Leubsdorf, Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News, "it was better than what we had in Grenada." Nonetheless, says Jonathan Wolman, Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, "I don't like pools. I like open coverage. Our guy just sat around in a little room, feeling frustrated."

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams blamed much of the difficulty with the Panama pool on "incompetence" -- his own and that of the Southern Command. The command's officers argued that logistics and concern for the safety of journalists made it impossible to permit pool members to get closer to the action.

So far the pool system has been tested twice under combat conditions: during the Navy's 1987 Persian Gulf operation and this year in Panama. Retired Major General Winant Sidle, who headed the Pentagon commission that recommended the pool system, has been unimpressed with the results. "If you're going to let the media in," Sidle says, "you have to let them do something." Others think there may be no acceptable way of achieving that goal. "I just don't see a happy ending to this story," says a Navy public affairs specialist. Pools, he adds, "just don't work."

They never will unless the military agrees to let reporters do their job. Even then, pools cannot substitute for hard-nosed, entrepreneurial reporting. Retired Admiral Joseph Metcalf, who led the Grenada task force, responded to complaints about the way the Panama pool was handled by huffing, "But what about the reporters who were already in Panama? They had plenty of indication that something was happening. They could have found out days in advance. If they can't use their knuckleheads, it's their own damn fault." The admiral was being unduly harsh, but he had a point.

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/Washington