The briefing was lengthy, packed with information and as candid as any the Bush Administration had yet given on the gulf war. But when General Colin Powell trotted out the visual aids last week, things got a bit fuzzy. One chart, showing the decline in Iraqi radar activity under allied bombing, was virtually devoid of numbers. Still, said Powell, the gist was accurate. "Trust me," he said. "Trust me."
That could be the battle cry from an emerging theater in the gulf conflict: the information front. Despite the deluge of words and pictures, analysis and speculation, pouring forth on TV and in print, the supply of reliable, objective information about the war's progress has been scant. Most of the dribs that have been released are coming from -- or have been carefully screened by -- Pentagon officials or their coalition equivalents. Inevitably, frustration with that eye-dropper approach has been on the rise, particularly among correspondents trying to cover the action. For others, less concerned with that friction than with monitoring the progress of the war, a pair of crucial questions came to the fore: Are they being told enough about what is happening on the battlefield? And can they trust what they are being told?
Disgruntlement among the press was roiling all week. Press briefings in Saudi Arabia grew testy, as tight-lipped officers evaded questions as simple as what the weather was like over Iraq. Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams was fending off more attacks than an Iraqi supply depot. "There is a beast of war out there, an elephant we're trying to describe," said a frustrated Forrest Sawyer on ABC's Nightline. "Based on the information we're given, we're about at the toenail range." Pentagon briefings, meanwhile, churned out sterile numbers (1,000 sorties a day, 80% of them successful) and confusing generalizations (Saddam's communications network was cut; then it wasn't).
Powell's relatively forthcoming press conference was a response to the demand for better information. But it did not stem the complaints of reporters in the field. Hampered by a pool arrangement that restricts them largely to specified trips arranged by military officials, correspondents grew restless -- and possibly reckless. Late in the week, a vehicle belonging to CBS-TV correspondent Bob Simon and three colleagues was found abandoned near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. Their whereabouts was still not known by the weekend, but they had apparently struck out on their own -- something allowed but discouraged under Pentagon rules -- to try to find out more about what was going on.
What is going on? Despite the saturation news coverage, Americans remain ignorant of countless details about the gulf operation, from the exact targets being hit in Iraq to the morale among U.S. troops on the front lines -- wherever those might be. Part of the problem, of course, is the nature of the war thus far. Most of it is taking place in the skies over Iraq, territory that is inaccessible to reporters. Confusion has also resulted from a mix of Pentagon obfuscation and reporters' unfamiliarity with military jargon and many technical details. It took nearly a week, for example, for the press to learn the definition of such terms as air superiority and the 80% success rate attributed to allied-bombing sorties.