WALTER CRONKITE: The military is serving at the will of the American people in a democracy; we assume we have a democracy. You can't possibly have a military that doesn't operate in the people's interests and in the open, as a democracy has to operate.

COL FRED PECK (USMC): We've tended to be very open in our dealings with the press. We basically say, "Come on down." Our best public relations is the naked event, "Come and see us. Watch us perform. Hopefully, we will perform well, and then tell the American public about it."

PETER ARNETT: The Pentagon talks about free access. They claim that there are few restrictions on the media. And yet it is clear that in the last 15 years -- the Grenada invasion, the Panama invasion, the Gulf War -- that the military has been putting draconian restrictions on the media and that their conduct in recent years and in a place like Haiti just confirms to me that they are not practicing what they preach.

Vice Admiral JOHN SHANAHAN (USN, Ret.): Welcome to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

The American people have the undeniable right to know what their military establishment is about. That is not really the issue. Misunderstandings as to how, when and who should inform the American people about military activities can and do create adversarial relationships between the Pentagon and the press. Our program today will examine both sides of that relationship.

NARRATOR: Historically, the military's attitude toward the news media has been an ambivalent one. While the military needs the press in order to retain the support of the public and Congress, it fears the success of its missions will be compromised by a probing press corps. The press, for its part, sees the military as an institution of government power that must be monitored.

Mr. CRONKITE: We should cover -- blanket coverage of every aspect of a military operation.

NARRATOR: Considered "the dean of television journalism," Walter Cronkite has covered virtually every major news event during his brilliant career as a journalist.

Mr. CRONKITE: We should be as often as we can be in the generals' tents as they consider the strategy of the operation. We should insist on briefings that are adequate, and are complete, and truthful. We should keep that pressure on at every point everytime.

COL PECK: The military, if it had its way, in most instances would like to keep everything secret, not tell anybody about anything, just go over there catch the enemy completely by surprise.

NARRATOR: COL Fred Peck, who was spokesman for the US military operation in Somalia until May 1993, is the deputy director of Public Affairs for the Marine Corps.

COL PECK: The media, on the other hand, wants to go in and find out everything that's going on, and report it back to the world, and has no real motive for not talking about things that they find out about. That's their business. In the military's context, it's almost like they're spies.

NARRATOR: In 1791, the right to a free press was guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson valued the press over the army as a defender of democratic principles.

When the Civil War began in 1861, the recent invention of the telegraph made it the first American war widely reported in a timely fashion. Reports of battles routinely reached the newsstand with in 24 hours. Over 600 correspondents covered the conflict, publishing sensitive information with such regularity that Confederate GEN Robert E. Lee became an avid reader of the northern press.

In the World War I, broad censorship was exercised and the newspapers often acted as a propaganda agent for the armed forces. When the "war to end all wars" came to a close in 1918, the American public had little understanding of what really had occurred. The backlash that followed fueled the American tendency toward isolationism, leaving the country ill-prepared for the global conflict that loomed next.

World War II marked a period of unprecedented coopera-tion between the military and the news media, which now included radio. GEN Dwight Eisenhower, convinced that a democracy could not wage war without widespread public support, stated: "Americans either will not or cannot fight at maximum efficiency unless they understand the why and wherefore of their orders." Reporters were permitted to travel freely and report on what they saw, and then their reports were submitted to a military censor, who would release them in the order that they were received.

Mr. CRONKITE: I think the censorship model of World War II worked quite well.

NARRATOR: As a United Press correspondent covering the European theater, Walter Cronkite flew in B-17 bomber raids, took part in the invasion of Normandy, and reported on the Nuremberg trials.

Mr. CRONKITE: It was understood that dispatches from the front had to be censored. Dispatches in England regarding the air war had to be censored. Everybody appreciated that necessity. The only question was the relationship between the press and the censors, whether that would be satisfactory or not. Whether, in fact -- the main point -- the censors would respect the ground rules that censorship should apply only to military security and not to political considerations. This is the danger always. That's where the thin line is.

NARRATOR: No one argues with the need to withhold informa-tion that could compromise the success of a mission. But censorship for other reasons -- to prevent embarrassment, conceal incompetence, or hide war's grim realities from the public -- could be seen as crossing that "thin line."

Mr. CRONKITE: The worst particular problem I ever had in World War II was when covering the air war out of England, I revealed something that the enemy knew quite clearly. The story was that we had adapted British Pathfinder techniques and had given up our high precision bombing, of which we were so proud and on which the whole American bombing effort had been built, and adopted the RAF Pathfinder technique: bombing through the clouds.

Well, the German Luftwaffe was with us the whole time we were bombing through the clouds. Anti-aircraft below knew there were clouds up there. The people who were being bombed knew there was a cloud cover. The only people that didn't know that we bombed through the clouds was the American public. And the Eighth Air Force didn't want them to know because they had built this whole story of our precision bombing.

And as a consequence, the censor released my story on my appeal that, 'Look, the Germans knew it. You're not hiding it from anybody.'

NARRATOR: The Vietnam War marked a turning point in the military-media relationship. It's often called "the first tele- vision war," although live coverage was not yet technologically feasible.

Mr. ARNETT: The Vietnam War was open to the media. We could travel on any helicopter or any aircraft on a space- available basis.

NARRATOR: CNN's Peter Arnett, best known for his reports from Baghdad during the Gulf War, covered the Vietnam conflict from start to finish for the Associated Press. His recent book, Live from the Battlefield, chronicles his experiences covering 17 wars.

INTERVIEWER: What lessons do you think the military took from the experience with the media in Vietnam?

Mr. ARNETT: They learned all the wrong lessons, unfortu-nately. They grew to believe that the free access of the media to military operations contributed to ultimately the loss of the war.

NARRATOR: However, historians have noted that all the major American newspapers supported the war effort as late as 1968, when public sentiment had already begun to turn.

COL PECK: The feeling with some people -- and I don't perceive it as accurate -- is that the media turned the American public against the war back here in the States. I think that's totally false. I think the American public, wisely, got tired of an administration's policies that seemed to make the war drag on without it coming to a close.

NARRATOR: Yet the idea that uncensored media coverage contributed to the loss of Vietnam persists.

COL PECK: It's one of those urban myths that -- you know, like the woman drying her poodle in the microwave -- that can't be proven to be fact, but it's -- it's still there. They're trying to put a cause and effect relationship on something that didn't exist.

JOHN MacARTHUR: The correct conclusion that the Pentagon drew from Vietnam, and the politicians drew from Vietnam, was the idea that it's better to manage information completely than partially.

NARRATOR: John MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine and the author of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," in which he examines the influence of Vietnam on the Pentagon's handling of subsequent conflicts.

Mr. MacARTHUR: Eventually, bad news started coming out that they couldn't manage. And they made a commitment that in all future wars, they would manage the news and manage the information in a way that would help them back home.

NARRATOR: So, when the United States invaded the island of Grenada in 1983, this is what the news coverage looked like:

[Blank screen displayed.]

That's right, nothing.

Mr. CRONKITE: It was three days before any reporter was permitted in. The reporters who tried to get in by boat, their own boats and rafts and things, were threatened with -- with execution on the spot; I mean, being shot as they tried to get ashore. And we still don't know, therefore, what really happened in those three days in Grenada. We have only the Army's version of what happened, and I don't think that's nearly good enough.

NARRATOR: Following news media protests, a commission recommended the establishment of a press pool system, in which a select group of journalists would be brought along on the initial operation, sharing the reports with other news organizations until the element of surprise was no longer needed and the pool could be disbanded. The first real test of the pool system was during the invasion of Panama in 1989.

COL PECK: The pool gets down there and -- I don't want to criticize individuals, but they terribly mishandled the pool. They sent them there and gave them briefings. They didn't want to take them out to where things were going on because there was shooting going on out there. Well, you know, funny thing. When you go to cover a war, normally you expect that there's going to be some shooting.

NARRATOR: The press pool was confined to a military base during the combat stage of the invasion. As a result, most Americans had the impression of a tidy little operation with cheering Panamanians welcoming US troops. Only well after the conflict was out of the news did video appear depicting the extent of the damage.

The military's handling of the news media during the Gulf War in 1991 is still a point of bitter contention between the two institutions.

Mr. MacARTHUR: The media got suckered very, very badly. And I say they got suckered because they should have known better, having been through Grenada and Panama. They ended up agreeing to a deal that essentially said the military will tell you where you can go, when you can go, and what you can report, and that's final and you can't do anything about it.

CLIFFORD BERNATH: In some ways, the coverage of that war was was the glass half-empty or was the glass half-filled.

NARRATOR: Clifford Bernath is the principal deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.

Mr. BERNATH: What we had was a good faith effort to get maximum coverage of a very difficult front and a very difficult war that was covered. Very fast moving, fast paced. So, I -- I don't make apologies for the coverage.

JOHN FIALKA: The media has some fault in what happened in the Gulf War, as well.

NARRATOR: Following the 1991 war with Iraq, John Fialka chronicled his and other reporters' battles with the military in "Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War."

Mr. FIALKA: We tended to manage ourselves a little over much. We did not examine the preparations for the -- that the military had made to let us communicate.

MARVIN KALB: The ground rules were set by the Pentagon. The video releases were provided by the Pentagon. The Pentagon vision prevailed during the Gulf War.

NARRATOR: Over a 30-year career with CBS and NBC, Marvin Kalb was chief diplomatic correspondent and moderator of "Meet the Press." Today he is director of the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.

Mr. KALB: I'm not persuaded, by the way, that we still know even half of what went on there. But the little bit that we do know suggests that what the Pentagon told us during the war was only some of the truth, not the whole truth, and that the Pentagon deliberately concealed many things that they knew because they didn't want to lose the support of the American people. That was one of the lessons of the Vietnam War that the Pentagon learned all too well.

NARRATOR: Another lesson of Vietnam applied to the Gulf War was the Pentagon's decision to limit the depiction of the human consequences of conflict. Vietnam is remembered as "a war of the body" -- body bags, body counts, injured soldiers and civilians. Although studies have shown only two percent of TV news reports from Vietnam actually depicted casualties those that did left searing images of the human toll of war.

In the Gulf War, we saw almost no images of casualties. In contrast to the daily "body counts" of enemy dead in Vietnam, Pentagon leaders displayed little interest in keeping track of enemy casualties in Iraq.

[At press briefing on 27 February 1991.]

REPORTER: Will there ever be any sort of accounting or head counts made or anything like that?

GEN NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: No. There will never be an exact count.

NARRATOR: This footage of US troops burying Iraqi dead was shot by Army cameramen and released only following a Freedom of Information Act request a year after the war ended.

SOLDIER (off-camera): The last thing the BC said to me is "make sure that nobody takes pictures." Just -- just showing the incongruity of it all. Wanted to make sure we didn't bring cameras out and take pictures.

NARRATOR: Even the Army was under orders to limit its video of enemy dead. On TV, images of human suffering were replaced by video of high-tech weapons hitting structural targets. Only after the war did it come to light that 93 percent of the ordinance dropped were conventional "dumb" bombs.

Back at home, the news media were barred from covering the return of American dead at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

COL PECK: That's just been a long-time policy for the -- out of respect for the individuals, out of respect for the families, we don't allow this -- that coverage.

Mr. ARNETT: Why was this restraint imposed? Because of political reasons. The fear within the Pentagon or within the political establishment was that any negatives at all could detrimentally affect public support for the war. And as a journalist, I think that -- I think that's absolutely ludicrous. If public support is so weak that a casket covered in a flag breaks national morale, we shouldn't be fighting wars.

NARRATOR: Today the military faces an array of new challenges in dealing with the press.

GEN CHARLES McCLAIN (USA): No matter where we've been since I've been the Chief of Public Affairs over the last -- almost four and a half, almost five years, the press have always been there before we were.

NARRATOR: As the author of the Army's "Vision 2000: Public Affairs Into the 21st Century," GEN Charles McClain points out the growing impact of what he calls "the continuously evolving global information environment."

GEN McCLAIN: The media itself has changed a great deal, from the standpoint of the proliferation of media, the interna-tionalization of media. So, I think our approach has to be better and different. And I think that's what we've worked pretty hard on, especially the last three or four years.

NARRATOR: The news media's ability to transmit live TV images from anywhere in the world is cause for particular concern.

GEN McCLAIN: Everybody has dishes and receivers. So, whomever your potential enemy may be, they can see exactly what's happening.

COL PECK: Some parent or spouse back in the United States could see their loved one killed live before their eyes as it actually happens.

Mr. CRONKITE: Pictorial reporting from the battlefield on a real-time basis is a military impossibility, and we in television ought to appreciate and realize that. You can't possibly transmit to a satellite a picture from the front line when the general on the other side is sitting there a mile back in his headquarters intercepting that picture.

But we must have access. The action must be recorded for as near-time as it can be safely released on a military basis. Hopefully, that would be within hours, perhaps even minutes, but it doesn't matter if it's days, weeks, or months, or years. If it's recorded, history has been served.

Mr. KALB: If I were at a network once again, I would want to cover it live. On the other hand, if I were in the Pentagon, I'd be terrified about live coverage, because I don't know what these maniac journalists are going to do next.

Mr. BERNATH: It's not a question of should it be permitted, because it's a reality. And the question is how do we deal with it.

Mr. MacARTHUR: What they're trying to do is prevent anybody from being there when it's happening.

Mr. ARNETT: The major complaints the military have about the presence of CNN and other media get down to political concerns, not security concerns. And this is an argument I have constantly. A general will tell me if CNN is there, the lives of my troops are in danger. No. If CNN is there, the career of the general's endangered if he makes a stupid decision, particularly stupid decisions that endanger his troops. CNN doesn't endanger troops at all.

NARRATOR: Clearly, the armed forces recognize the growing significance of their relationship with the news media.

COL PECK: The news media on the battlefield are ubiquitous. They're part of the terrain is the way we approach now. We say they're like the weather.

NARRATOR: However, there is some disagreement over the purpose of military public affairs efforts.

Mr. MacARTHUR: The goal of the military, in terms of public relations, is to snow the media and, through snowing the media, snow the public about what they're up to: To make war look palatable. To make war look, in some cases, fun. And to give the military a look of omniscience, of competence, of tax dollars well spent.

GEN McCLAIN: We, as an arm of the government, have an obligation to let the American people know what we're doing with probably the two most important things to them: One is their tax dollars, and that goes to the stewardship issue. And the second one is their sons and daughters.

NARRATOR: "Field Manual 100-5," the Army's handbook on war-fighting tactics, now includes a section on the impact of the media on operations. Today, an officer's education includes an ever-expanding curriculum of media awareness training.

At the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, Louisiana, a program called "Media on the Battlefield" puts troops in war games modeled on today's operations, and then sends in role-playing journalists to test their response to the media under pressure.

REPORTER (over chorus of others): "I was just wondering, you have a lot of people around" --

TRAINEE: "I'm sorry, Ma'am. I'm really busy. I need to attend these people."

SAME REPORTER: "Right. You have a lot of people here, however, that" -- (inaudible)

TRAINEE: ".. would you stay back away, please. Back away..."

TRAINER: "Remember, everything you say is on the record. And a camera's off, it doesn't matter, it's on the record. You say it, it can be used. And then, of course, making off-the-record comments, we don't do that. Okay? And there's no such thing as 'no comment' or 'I can't confirm or deny.'"

TRAINEE: "Ma'am, basically all the soldiers here are heros in one way or another."

GEN McCLAIN: It's not to make television stars out of sergeants or colonels, because -- You're in the television business. You would rather have someone sitting in this chair, probably even better than I, who is familiar with or doesn't freeze if you're trying to get a story.

NARRATOR: Walter Cronkite is not convinced of the value of such exercises.

Mr. CRONKITE: Well, if it helps train a public relations officer as to what might happen in the field dealing with the troops, that might be helpful. But otherwise, it's not worth a tinker's damn, for heavens sake. What's needed is not experi- menting in the field; they've got enough people who have been there who can testify. What's needed is a change of attitude, an understanding on the part of the military that they're serving the people, they're serving a democracy.

NARRATOR: Because the draft ended in 1972, few of today's younger reporters have much firsthand knowledge of the military. This lack of familiarity can contribute to mutual distrust.

GEN McCLAIN: I've seen no movement on the part of the press to try to understand us.

Mr. BERNATH: One of the things that we're doing to help that is trying to set up orientations for new reporters coming into the Pentagon, where they'll get out and be on a ship, and be on an airplane, go out and visit units just to give them a better feel for what's going on.

GEN McCLAIN: What they're reporting on is PFC Johnnie Jones and they need to understand Johnnie Jones's world.

NARRATOR: There is little agreement on the state of relations today.

Mr. BERNATH: I think the relationship between the military and the media has continued to grow since the Gulf War.

Mr. ARNETT: So, our relations with the Pentagon are bad, they're getting worse, and it's a pity that the Pentagon doesn't realize this.

NARRATOR: But journalists point out that there is a wide range in the type of treatment they've received from officers in the field.

Mr. FIALKA: Some of them want to work with us and learn to cooperate with us, and some of them want to manage us, and some of them don't know the difference.

NARRATOR: In times of war, the majority of Americans have traditionally sided with the military when it attempts to impose restrictions on the press. More often that not, the press has accepted the restrictions with little complaint, not wanting to appear unpatriotic.

Mr. KALB: The dangers for the American people of an overly patriotic press is that when the war is over, they may then find out that the losses were in vain.

Mr. CRONKITE: I maintain that the German people are just as guilty whether they knew precisely of the nature of the concen-tration camps or did not. When we got to those areas in World War II, the poor people in the nearby villages, the Germans in those villages -- good, ruddy-faced, nice looking people who looked just like all of my ancestors, and my grandmother, grandfather -- came out weeping, saying they didn't know about that.

They may not have known about that, but that's their fault that they didn't know. They're just as guilty as if they had known all the details, because they applauded lustily when Hitler clamped down on the press, and censored the press and destroyed the opposition press.

Those who applaud that kind of crackdown in America today are willing to shuck the responsibility for what the Army does in their name and what the government does in their name. That's not a democracy.

NARRATOR: The roots of tension between the military and the press lie in the inherent differences between the two institu-tions: One by nature secretive and hierarchical, the other skeptical and intrusive. Both are vital to our national wellbeing. Both are intended to serve the public. It's up to the public to demand that both do their jobs well.

Mr. CRONKITE: If the people would not only express their right to know but their need to know a little more vociferously, they'd probably have better newspapers and better broadcasts, and they'd be protected against government incursions into those rights.

ADM SHANAHAN: And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The adversarial relationship between the press and the Pentagon is alive and well, and that isn't all bad. Informed debate over opposing viewpoints is how one arrives at the truth, and that is the goal of a free press in a free society.

Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Jack Shanahan.

[End of broadcast.]