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.
