(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
by Brent Baker
Asked by a Chicago Tribune columnist whether National Public Radio correspondents “would report the presence of an American commando unit” presumably unknown to the enemy in a “northern Pakistan village,” NPR senior foreign editor Loren Jenkins responded: “You report it” since “I don't represent the government. I represent history, information, what happened.”
Jenkins also contended that “in one form or another,” the military “never tell you the truth.”
His comments were quoted in an October 12 column by Steve Johnson in the Chicago Tribune which Jim Romenesko highlighted Friday on his MediaNews page.
An excerpt from Johnson's column:
Just as the international politics of the American-led war on
terrorism is a maze, so is the attempt to cover the campaign.That truth has been underscored this week as the first American bombs have dropped on Afghanistan, and the American public has seen nothing like the vivid video that came back from the
Persian Gulf War, no pictures of American correspondents on a rooftop in Kabul, providing play-by-play on incoming missiles.A seminal moment came midday Monday, Day Two of the bombings, when CNN had its screen split between its live “exclusive” Nightscope pictures of Afghanistan, showing what appeared to be nothing, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying not much more.
“The 'fog of war' takes on new meaning in this particular circumstance,” says Tom Yellin, an ABC News executive producer.
“It implies you're in the middle. We can't be in the middle of it. It's the fog in the distance. It's far away, and it's very foggy.”…
Journalists predict that coverage will continue to be a struggle for the duration of the conflict, complicated by its likely episodic and decentralized nature, a White House-led clampdown on information, and an American public more hungry to win than they are to know.
In such a murky environment, they say, the basic journalism values of reporting and skepticism become more valuable than ever.
“The best reporting is getting to a place and assessing it yourself,” says Loren Jenkins, senior foreign editor of National Public Radio. “Since Vietnam, the Pentagon has made this harder and harder for reporters to do, mostly because they all blame the press for losing the war in Vietnam.”
Jenkins has some 13 reporters in the area of Afghanistan and the Middle East, in the kind of all-hands-on-deck approach typical of news organizations' response, and he says his marching orders to the troops are to try to find where the Americans are.
“The game of reporting is to smoke 'em out,” he says. Asked whether his team would report the presence of an American
commando unit it found in, say, a northern Pakistan village, he doesn't exhibit any of the hesitation of some of his news-business colleagues, who stress that they try to factor security issues into their coverage decisions.“You report it,” Jenkins says. “I don't represent the government. I represent history, information, what happened.”…
American reporters are already on U.S. warships, but an open question is to what degree American reporters will be allowed to accompany ground troops, especially because nobody knows whether ground action will ever be more concerted than secret raids.
No news executive in his right mind expects to have a reporter accompany the Green Berets, but a coalition of news organizations has been talking with Pentagon officials to try to extract promises that the news media will be able to report firsthand on military action when feasible.
News organizations and, presumably, some segment of the public felt burned after the Gulf War, when they learned American military's tight control on information had included misleading
reports about how smart the so-called “smart bombs” really were.At NPR, Jenkins' operating theory about information from the military is that “in one form or another, they never tell you the truth. They've been proven wrong too many times.”
Or, as MSNBC President Erik Sorenson puts it, “We'll find out in five or 10 years what the real truth is.”….
For the entire column, go here.
The attitude of Jenkins reminded me of a 1989 PBS session with Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings. Wallace and Jennings agreed that if they were traveling with enemy troops and learned of an ambush planned to kill U.S. soldiers they would not provide any warning. For details go here.