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All of this is exacerbated by the delicate problem facing journalists in any war: how to communicate events fairly and accurately without revealing confidential military information. The problem has been made even tougher by the advent of live, satellite-fed TV communication. While U.S. viewers are watching air-raid alerts and Scud attacks as they happen, so are the Iraqis, via CNN. One ill-advised sentence or too revealing a picture could put troops in danger.
Reporters acknowledge, and always have, that restrictions are necessary in wartime. They voluntarily adhered to security guidelines for press coverage during the Vietnam War. Yet they are now feeling the heavy hand of the Pentagon in a more direct fashion. In Vietnam reporters were free to travel almost anywhere they wanted in areas under nominal U.S. control. With the restrictive gulf pool system, military escorts stand by while a limited number of journalists conduct their interviews. Pentagon officials insist that the pools are intended to help reporters gain access and to avoid the nightmare of more than 700 journalists all trying to reach the front lines at once. "Having reporters running around would overwhelm the battlefield," says Colonel Bill Mulvey, director of the military's Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran.
Logistics, though, is hardly the military's main concern. All press reports from the gulf must be passed by military censors, who look for taboo details such as troop locations or hints of future operations. Their ostensible aim is to protect the lives of American servicemen, a goal no journalist would decry. But complaints are growing about the arbitrary and dilatory way in which the censors are operating. When ABC News wanted to report that the pilot had been rescued from a downed F-14, military censors refused to allow the plane to be identified. Reason: the F-14 carries a two-man crew, and the Iraqis would know to look for the other member. "That sounded perfectly reasonable to us," says Richard Kaplan, coordinator of ABC's coverage in Saudi Arabia. "Then 20 minutes later they have a briefing, and the briefer says, 'An F-14 was shot down, and we picked up one of the pilots.' "
Similarly a report from New York Times correspondent Malcolm Browne that U.S. warplanes had hit an Iraqi nuclear installation was held up for two days while censors wrangled over wording. By the time his story was cleared, the Pentagon had announced the same news.
The military scrutiny is not only slowing the flow of information; it is also making it difficult for the public to assess the war. Forcing reporters into supervised pools, for example, reduces the chance that candid opinions or negative news about the war will be reported. "If combat boots are wearing out, as they did in Vietnam, or weapons are not working, somebody has to be there to report it," says ABC correspondent Morton Dean. "If we're not there, who is going to do it?"