THE
REAL-TIME WAR
TV: A Missed
Opportunity
BY PAUL
FRIEDMAN
After a week of war, a senior producer at one of the
network news divisions was reduced to muttering darkly about a
Pentagon conspiracy. Much had been said about unprecedented media
access to the front lines, but with descriptions flowing in of
bloody pitched battles in Basra and Umm Qasr, the producer
complained, “I have yet to see decent video of a firefight.”
Very little went as
predicted. The war did not open with a bomb attack designed to
reduce the enemy to “shock and awe,” but with a focused attack aimed
at Saddam Hussein and his leadership core. Not all Iraqi soldiers
ran away, and not all that many civilians greeted their liberators
with open arms. Broadcast networks quickly returned to basketball
games and highly rated sitcoms and Oscar ceremonies, and were only
mildly criticized. Then they left 24/7 coverage to cable news, and
waited for a major battle for Baghdad that never took place. And
news coverage of this war — even with the heralded “embedding” of
more than 600 journalists in dozens of armed forces units — was less
dramatically different than many had expected.
The embedding
process was, in a sense, a bold return to the Vietnam War, the last
time the government was willing to take its chances with giving
reporters the freedom to cover military action up close, with few
restrictions. For television, the combination of access and new
technology meant the possibility of covering the war live from the
battlefield. War meets the small video camera and instant
transmission via computer, videophone, and satellite. How much more
dramatic could it get? Yet embedding did not live up to advance
billing, at least at the beginning. Still, as time went on, the
impact of embedded reporters became very important, and a central
part of the debate over the war. Of course, we should not have been
surprised.
THE LONG-DISTANCE WAR
At first, the
embedded television reports had a gee-whiz quality that overwhelmed
the fact that very little information was being conveyed. NBC’s
David Bloom (later, tragically, to die of an embolism) traveled at
high speeds across the Iraqi desert, broadcasting live from his
customized “Bloommobile,” and making other broadcasters drool with
envy. The pictures were irresistibly fascinating, though perhaps not
crammed with information. ABC’s Ted Koppel gave viewers one of the
first embedded reports to deliver on the potential of live
television; he was able to bring together stunning pictures,
information, and vivid descriptions from the scene of a massive
column of armored vehicles breaching the berms into Iraq. It was
hard for any viewer not to be impressed with the sight of the
seemingly endless column of tanks and personnel carriers,
unchallenged, starting the long trek toward Baghdad. Never mind that
other units not too far away were crossing the berms and coming
under fire; we would all soon learn (and some would complain) that
the embedded reports, while largely accurate, could only supply
small “slices” of reality, and might not reflect the overall
picture. Never mind that Koppel’s conversation with Peter Jennings,
thousands of miles away in a New York studio, clearly showed how
impressed they were with what was playing out before them; it may
have provided the Pentagon with exactly what it wanted (as some
critics predicted the embedding would do). But it was unavoidable,
and it was early.
Many of the early
reports from the embedded television reporters were of the
standing-in-front-of-the-camera, chest-thumping, "look at where I
am," and "we’re ready to go but I can’t tell you exactly where for
security reasons" variety, followed by the anchors back home warning
the reporters to “stay safe” and asking them to relay best wishes to
the troops. (Fox’s Shepard Smith to correspondent Rick Leventhal,
embedded with the Marines: “Rick, Godspeed and our best to the men
there.”) On the move, the reporters and their cameramen followed a
story they usually could not really see; it’s the nature of modern
warfare that much of it takes place with the enemy a long distance
away. The embedded reporter and camera see weapons fired at an
unseen enemy and, if they are lucky (or unlucky), they may see
tracers of weapons fired back. But there is seldom the time or the
mobility needed to reconstruct what happened and tell a complete
story. Leventhal described one of the first Marine engagements as a
“tremendous pyrotechnics display” of outgoing artillery fire, but
“whether they’re hitting their targets, we cannot tell you.” Later,
as American troops closed on Baghdad, there was video of destroyed
Iraqi armor, pickup trucks with mounted weapons, and other vehicles.
But nothing matched the reports of hundreds of tanks destroyed, and
there was certainly no video to document reports of thousands of
Iraqi soldiers killed. Either the bodies were removed before the
embedded units caught up with the targets they’d attacked from miles
away or they were steering around them. Or the reports were off
base.
Some of the best
live television reports came when the story found the camera: NBC’s
Bloom was on camera when a powerful sandstorm brought total darkness
at 4:15 in the afternoon; CNN’s Walter Rodgers was doing an
otherwise routine live interview with an Army sergeant when the
soldier turned and fear crept across his face as he heard incoming
fire, and they both ran for cover.
THE TECHNOLOGY TRAP
Most of the pictures
were not very special. Even though there was much tougher fighting
than predicted, little of it was seen on video. (Anyone who doubts
it should have spent an hour or two watching the same few seconds of
footage repeated over and over again, often when it bore no relation
to what was being discussed.) The reasons for the scarcity of great
combat video will not be absolutely clear until the embedded
reporters, producers, and cameramen are thoroughly debriefed after
the war, but several factors seem to be involved (in addition to the
long-distance nature of much of the fighting). The journalists
embedded with American units had to stick close to them, both
because they were on the move a lot, and because the military was
worried about the journalists’ safety and restricted their
movements. (Several journalists who tried to go it alone got in bad
trouble quickly; two died in the first days of the war.) Journalists
embedded with British units were given somewhat greater slack;
partially because of that and partially because of the close
fighting the British forces did in southern Iraq, most of the “good”
video in the first stages of the war came from the British agencies.
In addition, the
American television journalists put enormous emphasis on making
frequent live transmissions, which forced them to spend a great deal
of time on the logistics and technology — time that could not be
spent on gathering pictures and information for more complete
stories. It turned out the technology was not quite ready for this
war. The small cameras were great until the sand and general wear
and tear ruined them; ABC’s Mike Cerre took four cameras with him
and complained he was down to the last one as his Marine unit neared
Baghdad. New, small satellite transmission equipment either failed
completely or worked less often than hoped. The “store and forward”
technique of transferring video to the laptop and then by telephone
to the States did provide excellent quality, but it took too much
time — roughly thirty minutes to feed one minute. At least half of
what viewers saw on television was transmitted by videophone, a
relatively old technique that is fast and simple to use, but
produces very rough video and ragged sound. The best pictures from
this war were the still photos and, ironically, the video over which
American journalists had no control. Until the troops reached
Baghdad at the end of the third week, there were many days when the
best video came from cameras abandoned by the networks on the roofs
of Baghdad but still transmitting, or from the cameras transmitting
from U.S. weapons and shown at Pentagon briefings to document direct
hits, or from government cameras covering the nighttime rescue of
Private Jessica Lynch and the nighttime invasion of a presidential
palace.
RUMSFELD’S PROBLEMS
Still, reporters who
knew how to report and write and speak were able to use embedding to
their advantage and ours. After three decades of tight control by
the government, combat news actually was found and reported within
minutes of its happening, and well before military briefers
confirmed it and doled it out. The most dramatic early example of
this, ironically, brought memories of Vietnam: a “fragging” incident
in the headquarters tents of the 101st Airborne. Embedded
journalists reported it quickly, and one of them — who said he was
listening in on Army radios at the base — almost immediately was
able to knock down initial reports of terrorism, and correctly
identify the suspect as an American soldier. We are left to guess
how soon, or even whether, the Pentagon would have revealed all this
if there had been no reporters at the scene.
More important, it
was embedded reporters who gave us the first indications that the
campaign against Saddam Hussein was not going as predicted. CNN’s
Rodgers, talking to the camera, unaided by pictures, was able to
paint vivid word pictures of the relentless small attacks on units
of the Seventh Cavalry as they pushed north and across the Euphrates
River — “Seventy-two hours of continuous fighting,” he said. ABC’s
Koppel reported that all thirty-two Apache helicopters returning
from a mission had bullet holes in them. CNN’s Martin Savidge
described a hazardous mission to refuel forward elements running
dangerously low on fuel; others reported shortages of food and
water, and cases of rationing. The BBC’s David Willis, with U.S.
Marines in central Iraq, reported that “we’ve got to the stage where
some of the infantry here are down to one meal a day, so it’s a
pretty difficult situation supplying such a large and high-tech
army.” John Roberts of CBS was able to feed pictures of marines
trying to protect convoys near Nasiriya, and raised questions about
whether there were enough troops to protect the long lines of
supply.
All of this was
quite different from the initial pictures of rapid advances by U.S.
forces, and the reaction was swift. After less than a week of war,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained that while the
“breathtaking” minute-by-minute coverage was generally accurate, the
“slices” of reported fighting lacked overall context and made people
believe the fighting had been going on for weeks rather than days.
The plan, he said repeatedly, was working.
Secretary Rumsfeld’s
argument had two problems. First, day after day the embedded
reporters were gathering evidence at the scene. It turns out, of
course, that while embedding runs the risk of some journalists’
getting too chummy with soldiers, it also means that some soldiers
get chummy with journalists — and they talk. They talk about bad
decisions, malfunctioning equipment, dwindling supplies, and an
enemy that wasn’t rolling over the way it was supposed to. (Marine
sergeant to reporter, on camera: “The United States was planning on
walking in here like it was easy and all . . . . It’s not that easy
to conquer a country, is it?”) That was Rumsfeld’s second problem:
before the war, when the administration was selling it, most
background briefings predicted a relatively quick, easy fight, and
minimized worries about troop levels and long supply lines. There
were some public pronouncements — like those of some officials
predicting a collapsing Iraqi “house of cards” — that helped create
an overly optimistic set of expectations.
Still, there was
merit in the objection raised by Secretary Rumsfeld and others that
more context was needed. It got support from disparate members of
the media.
CNN’s anchor, Aaron
Brown, said during one broadcast that the embedded reporters give us
“snapshots” of what is going on, “and it’s our job here to put it
all together.” ABC’s George Will observed somewhat more elegantly
that “today’s problem — live television from journalists with units
engaged in Iraq — is the problem of context. Up-close combat
engagements almost always look confusing and awful because they
are.” Necessarily, it was up to the anchors, former generals, and
other experts to provide context. They did, often ad nauseam.
What was really
missing were the kinds of stories that came out of Vietnam: the
up-close and detailed stories with beginnings, middles, and ends;
the gritty, gripping stories about people and courage and fear and
heroism. It did not matter that it took days for those stories to
make it back to the States and onto the air. They gave us much more
than tiny slices of war and they were, in their way, timeless — just
the opposite of what was most prized by news executives who were
driven to compete this time on terms dictated by the
twenty-four-hour cable networks: put as many people as possible in
as many places as possible, and use smaller, lighter gear to get
them on the air live. That need dovetailed nicely with the
Pentagon’s tight restrictions on the number of journalists and the
amount of television equipment it could or would accommodate with
each unit. But it did not produce the kind of television journalism
we deserved. While the embedded journalists were brave, and often
endured conditions that well-trained soldiers ten to forty years
younger found tough, it was unrealistic to expect two-person
television teams working under such conditions with inadequate
equipment to do much more than they did. Especially in tough
situations, television journalists must be allowed to concentrate on
the jobs they do best. It is the old-fashioned (and more expensive)
model that allows reporters to report, producers to produce,
cameramen to take pictures, and technicians to worry about sound and
lights and keeping the gear working. It’s not always necessary —
different stories require different resources — but it is no
coincidence that this war’s most memorable pieces were turned in by
strong reporters (ABC’s Koppel and CBS’s Scott Pelley stood out),
who—whether embedded or not — had the benefit of working with a
producer, an extra crew member, and sometimes a satellite
technician. They also had the personal clout or the support from
editors back home to take more time on their pieces and less on
“live shots.”
The ambitious
experiment with embedding started to wind down as American troops
took over in Baghdad, and embedded journalists began to leave their
units to pursue their own stories. The triumph in Baghdad provided
the war’s most symbolic piece of video: the statue of Saddam being
pulled down from its pedestal in Firdos Square. But it was not
embedding that produced this demonstration of television’s power to
define a story. The scene played out in front of the Palestine
Hotel, where many journalists rode out the war, and where the
cameras waited.
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Paul Friedman, former executive vice-president and former
managing editor for ABC News, is senior news consultant to ABC News
and consults for other networks as well.