The Media and the Military (July/August 1991 | Volume: 42, Issue: 4)

The Media and the Military

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Authors: Peter Andrews

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

July/August 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 4

After more than 130 years, the fundamental dispute between the American media and the American military has changed hardly at all. The essential argument is still about access. How much should the press be allowed to know and see of the conduct of battle? Access was the question posed by the eighteen hundred media personnel accredited to cover Operation Desert Storm in Iraq earlier this year when fewer than three hundred were permitted onto the field in press pools so carefully escorted and monitored that one correspondent likened them to “excursion tours for senior citizens.”

It’s been a long, acrimonious road from Bull Run to Basra. Sometimes, the press has the upper hand; sometimes, the generals do. But the basic argument never changes.
 

Access was all Florus Plympton of the Cincinnati Commercial wanted in September 1861 when he arrived at William Tecumseh Sherman’s command in Kentucky with a sheaf of letters of introduction from Sherman’s military superiors and a request for an interview. Sherman, who hated the press with a devouring flame, ordered the newsman to take the next train back to Louisville. When Plympton protested that he had come only to learn the truth, Sherman flew into a fine rage.

“We don’t want the truth told about things here,” Sherman exploded. ”… We don’t want the enemy any better-informed than he is.”

With varying degrees of acrimony, that conversation has been going on ever since.

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the victor in the Persian Gulf, claims an affection for the writings of Sherman, and several times during the Gulf War he quoted the old general more aptly and accurately than many military historians have. More important, Schwarzkopf and his forces paid honor to Sherman’s memory not only by conducting a flanking action reminiscent of Sherman at his best but by accomplishing something Sherman never did. Thanks to careful planning and meticulous execution, as well as the kind of good luck that goes with such planning and execution, they managed to control the press to a degree not seen in our history. With few meaningful exceptions, the words and the pictures were entirely those approved by the military command.

If the media were as well disciplined and given to conducting extensive critiques of their performance as the military is, there would be a large group of high-level news personnel huddled around a sand table at the Columbia Journalism School right now, re-running the exercise and trying to discover what went wrong. It is important to find out, for while an unfettered press may sometimes be nettlesome, a tame, obedient press is always dangerous. If ever there was an object lesson in this, it was demonstrated by Saddam Hussein, who, immediately after the cease-fire, threw foreign journalists out of Iraq so he could go back to slaughtering his own people without letting them read about it in the papers.

It is not in their natures for the