Retired General Urges Military To Engage The Press(McCaffrey)

Back in Desert Storm, you might have caught Barry McCaffrey on television. He commanded the 24th Infantry Division as it wheeled in a 240-mile left hook across the desert.

Should war come to that part of the world again, you'll probably see McCaffrey on TV again - but this time as an analyst for NBC News, which he joined in September 2001.

Ever since Vietnam, Army generals have tended to hold the press at arm's length. But McCaffrey expresses no qualms about becoming a part of the press.

He said in an interview here this week: "When I signed on with NBC, another retired general asked me, 'Barry, why are you doing this?' - as if I'd gone over to the other side.

"And I told him, 'You have a responsibility to tell the American people what the national security process is. And it's the right of American soldiers to talk to the press.'"

McCaffrey retired with four stars. He said high rank brought with it a high responsibility. "I think commanders are supposed to talk to the press," he said. "I tell commanders, 'You personally get in front of the TV cameras - especially if something's going wrong. Explain what's happening. And then get back to work.'"

Even so, McCaffrey expressed some skepticism about the Pentagon's plan to "embed" about 500 reporters with the military units poised around Iraq.

"That's too many reporters," he said. "I figure it works out to a squad's worth of reporters for each battalion."

Under the plan, reporters will stick with the individual unit to which they're attached. The ground rules bar them from roaming around the battlefield to other units, other stories.

But McCaffrey has spent too much time around reporters to believe that the ground rules will hold.

"If they think reporters aren't going to move around on the battlefield, they're kidding themselves," he said. "When a big story breaks, they're going to want to get to it. And the closer they are to the front, the less bull they'll have to face."

McCaffrey said that if 60 reporters had shown up in 1991 at the headquarters of his 24th Infantry Division, he would have been unhappy.

Instead, in 1991, small pools of reporters went out to various units to cover for all the rest. "The pool system wasn't very well administered," McCaffrey conceded. And he called the communications technology of 1991 primitive next to today's. "The technical means to file stories just wasn't there," he said.

The high command handed McCaffrey a pool of six or seven reporters. "We furnished them all with chemical protective gear, vehicles and a GPS," he said. "And they all got a complete briefing from me. They knew the division's war plan."

In return, McCaffrey committed the reporters to guard sensitive information, to refrain from worst-case-scenario questions - and to keep their cameras capped around wounded Americans reluctant to be photographed.

"I told them, 'If you take any pictures like that, I'll run over your cameras with a tank.'"

"For 10 years now, I've been trying to change the army's attitude toward the press," he said. "I've given talks at the Army War College, at the Command and General Staff College and to 'Capstone' classes," for newly promoted one-star generals.

But McCaffrey said, "The Army is still the worst of the lot - and the Marines are probably still the best."

Even so, McCaffrey said, as memories of Vietnam recede, the Army's relations with the press get better. "I think we've improved enormously," he said.

Even so, McCaffrey expressed some skepticism about the Pentagon's plan to "embed" about 500 reporters with the military units poised around Iraq.

"That's too many reporters," he said. "I figure it works out to a squad's worth of reporters for each battalion."

I agree. Our troops don't have time to babysit them either.

"I told them, 'If you take any pictures like that, I'll run over your cameras with a tank.'"

I have no doubt that he would have.

But McCaffrey said, "The Army is still the worst of the lot - and the Marines are probably still the best."

True statement

Good points made by McCaffery.

Media Watch -- 04/01/1989 -- Page One: Reporters First, ...

From the April 1989 MediaWatch

Page One
Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace Agree

Reporters First, Americans Second

In a future war involving U.S. soldiers what would a TV reporter do if he learned the enemy troops with which he was traveling were about to launch a surprise attack on an American unit? That's just the question Harvard University professor Charles Ogletree Jr, as moderator of PBS' Ethics in America series, posed to ABC anchor Peter Jennings and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace. Both agreed getting ambush footage for the evening news would come before warning the U.S. troops.

For the March 7 installment on battlefield ethics Ogletree set up a theoretical war between the North Kosanese and the U.S.-supported South Kosanese. At first Jennings responded: "If I was with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans."

Wallace countered that other reporters, including himself, "would regard it simply as another story that they are there to cover." Jennings' position bewildered Wallace: "I'm a little bit of a loss to understand why, because you are an American, you would not have covered that story."

"Don't you have a higher duty as an American citizen to do all you can to save the lives of soldiers rather than this journalistic ethic of reporting fact?" Ogletree asked. Without hesitating Wallace responded: "No, you don't have higher duty... you're a reporter." This convinces Jennings, who concedes, "I think he's right too, I chickened out."

Ogletree turns to Brent Scrowcroft, now the National Security Adviser, who argues "you're Americans first, and you're journalists second." Wallace is mystified by the concept, wondering "what in the world is wrong with photographing this attack by North Kosanese on American soldiers?" Retired General William Westmoreland then points out that "it would be repugnant to the American listening public to see on film an ambush of an American platoon by our national enemy."

A few minutes later Ogletree notes the "venomous reaction" from George Connell, a Marine Corps Colonel. "I feel utter contempt. Two days later they're both walking off my hilltop, they're two hundred yards away and they get ambushed. And they're lying there wounded. And they're going to expect I'm going to send Marines up there to get them. They're just journalists, they're not Americans."

Wallace and Jennings agree, "it's a fair reaction." The discussion concludes as Connell says: "But I'll do it. And that's what makes me so contemptuous of them. And Marines will die, going to get a couple of journalists."

Why Americans Hate the Media - 96.02 Longer version of above

Remedy, I was just going to post the same article. I used to teach an AFROTC course on Leadership and Ethics at UMass Lowell. This is one of the videos I used to show for the ethics portion of the course. Pretty disgusting stuff. I'll also never forget the time I was being interviewed by a local TV station about a competition we used to have in the ICBM community called Olympic Arena. Kind of a Bomb Comp for missiliers. Anyway, the reporter edited the footage so that the casual viewer could easily misconstrue what I said. Anything for a good story is the mantra of the media as far as I'm concerned. I don't trust them. I certainly wouldn't trust them when the balloon goes up. Too many other things to think about by then.

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