ad info

CNN.com
 MAIN PAGE
 WORLD
 ASIANOW
 U.S.
 U.S. LOCAL
 ALLPOLITICS
  TIME
  analysis
  community
 WEATHER
 BUSINESS
 SPORTS
 TECHNOLOGY
 NATURE
 ENTERTAINMENT
 BOOKS
 TRAVEL
 FOOD
 HEALTH
 STYLE
 IN-DEPTH

 custom news
 Headline News brief
 daily almanac
 CNN networks
 on-air transcripts
 news quiz

 CNN WEB SITES:
CNN Websites
 TIME INC. SITES:
 MORE SERVICES:
 video on demand
 video archive
 audio on demand
 news email services
 free email accounts
 desktop headlines
 pointcast
 pagenet

 DISCUSSION:
 message boards
 chat
 feedback

 SITE GUIDES:
 help
 contents
 search

 FASTER ACCESS:
 europe
 japan

 WEB SERVICES:
 TIME CNN/AllPolitics CNN/AllPolitics with Congressional Quarterly

Speak no details

The Pentagon has a new media strategy for this war. Here's how it works

By Romesh Ratnesar

April 12, 1999
Web posted at: 12:09 p.m. EDT (1609 GMT)

TIME magazine

The most entertaining sideshow of the war in Kosovo is staged almost every day at the Pentagon's press briefing room. There exasperated reporters conduct jousting sessions with uniformed military commanders in vain attempts to divine the most banal of battlefield data information. How many NATO air strikes have been aborted because of bad weather? "I'm afraid I can't get into that level of detail right off the top of my head," Vice Admiral Scott Fry said at a Pentagon briefing early in the campaign. How about an approximation? "I'd prefer not to even approximate it." A ballpark figure? "I don't have that information available." How many of Milosevic's surface-to-air missile launchers have been taken out by NATO bombers? "That's a military number I'm not going to talk about," Major General Charles Wald told a reporter last week. How about a guess? "A large percentage." A large percentage of SAM launchers? "The launchers themselves, no...He still has a large number left." But you just said...oh, never mind.

Rating the spokesmen

Kenneth Bacon
U.S.Department of Defense

Strengths: Clear, forthright, a straight shooter
Weaknesses: Orville Redenbacher demeanor belies faith in keeping a lid on details

Jamie Shea
NATO

Strengths: Folksy and amiable; doesn't hide outrage about Serbian atrocities
Weaknesses: Tends to filibuster; gives speeches instead of answers

David Wilby
NATO Military

Strengths: Delivers bomb data crisply and with charm
Weaknesses: At times stodgy, he can exaggerate NATO successes and reliably skips mention of any failures

This may seem like something out of Ionesco, but the Pentagon is playing by a script. For months Secretary of Defense William Cohen has fretted that Pentagon officials were leaking too much sensitive security information to the press. The top brass ordered a clampdown on the release of specifics about the NATO campaign in Kosovo, so military briefers have remained maddeningly vague. Take the oft-repeated NATO goal of "degrading" the Yugoslav military. "Degrading could mean breaking the window of a barracks," says George Wilson, a former Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post. "We don't have any specifics. It's much more restrictive than other wars I've covered." Journalists are getting testy. Last week, when Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon opened a briefing by saying he would take questions "until the cows go home," reporters were unimpressed. "How about until the refugees go home?" an irritated wag wearily asked.

But just as the Pentagon is experimenting with new tactics in the skies over Kosovo, it is also experimenting with new ways of handling the media. Bacon says that in the age of cell phones and the Internet, the Serbs have instant access to any military information put out to the press, meaning that even basic military info can be translated immediately into Serbian battle plans. "We've just decided to give them as little information as possible," he said on the NewsHour last week. There have been cracks in the armor: some Pentagon officials were upset when the Washington Post reported, two days in advance of an attack, that the U.S. planned to widen air strikes to target ministries in Belgrade.

Winning the media war

NEWSPAPERS
With most foreign journalists expelled, the Washington Post's Peter Finn and the Los Angeles Times' Paul Watson provided rare reporting from Kosovo. Finn was detained and kicked out, but Watson has filed almost daily from Pristina

TELEVISION
Serbian censorship has made this a less video-driven war than the one in Iraq. Still, NBC's Ron Allen has roughed it in Belgrade to deliver daily reports. Though he left Yugoslavia briefly, CNN's Brent Sadler has returned and broken key stories

ON THE WEB
Despite heroic efforts by the independent radio station B92 to broadcast news via the Internet (b92.net), Milosevic shut it down. One site that still offers fresh audio and video news from across the Balkans is the BBC (news.bbc.co.uk)

There may also be a more cynical motivation behind all this news management: it allows the Pentagon and NATO to shield potentially embarrassing details about the war. Despite video footage showing pinpoint allied missile attacks, the military acknowledges that only a small percentage of NATO planes have dropped ordnance on their targets so far. And though the Pentagon declined to say last week what portion of the total NATO sorties had been flown by U.S. aircraft, most military observers believe Americans are doing as much as 80% of the dirty work.

Of course, military briefings can never tell the full story of a war. But the conditions on the ground are even worse. Milosevic's expulsion of almost all foreign reporters from Yugoslavia and his crackdown on independent local journalists--have left Western viewers with little more than Serbian television images of towns smoldering from stray NATO bombs. The West calls it propaganda: U.S. intelligence officials say they have evidence that buildings in Kosovo that the government claims NATO destroyed were actually blown up by Yugoslav agents themselves. Sadly, the truth will likely remain buried in the rubble.

--Reported by Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington


MORE TIME STORIES:

Cover Date: April 19, 1999

Search CNN/AllPolitics
          Enter keyword(s)       go    help


© 1999 Cable News Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Terms under which this service is provided to you.
Read our privacy guidelines.
Who we are.