As a retired naval aviator with a son in the Marine Corps flying Cobras in Iraq, I followed the television news of the war intently. With regard to analysis of that coverage, there seems to be a self-congratulatory tone in both military and media circles. To both groups, I say, not so fast. Despite some notable successes, there were problems that both sides need to address.
Most broadcasts from Kuwait and Iraq featured the networks' embedded reporters, who seemed to be on camera a disproportionately large part of each broadcast. Well-known journalists were featured even more. Day after day, we saw them in different venues, riding atop Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks, faces firmly in focus as the featureless desert landscape sped by in the background. This emphasis on the reporter rather than on the news and the men and women making that news was inappropriate and unprofessional. Before it was over, two experienced reporters, Geraldo Rivera and Peter Arnett, crossed the line between reporters and newsmakers and were fired.
Some of the embedded reporters had experienced combat, but most had not. Inexperienced reporters have limited situational awareness and no chain-of-command leadership. So when the cameras in Iraq focused on the reporters and the on-the-air lights glowed, the stories that followed were of Armageddon second lieutenants' breathless after-action reports of determined fire fights at sandy intersections, isolated hamlets, or bypassed cities were screened and put in perspective by several levels of military command before they were keyed into the big picture. Reporters' equally breathless reports of the same events had no such vetting or screening in their organizational chain of command. They aired their reports directly to a fascinated but fearful U.S. public who often had little choice but to believe what they were being shown and told. What they saw was only a small part of the overall picture—yet the presentation appeared to be all encompassing.
One Friday night during the war, I caught the end of the local news broadcast, which said that a Marine Cobra had gone down in south-central Iraq, killing both pilots, whose names were "withheld pending notification of next of kin." This was well within my son's squadron's operating area. I spent a sleepless night fruitlessly checking the Internet every 20-30 minutes for updates on the story. I figured that as soon as the next of kin had been notified, the Pentagon would immediately release the pilots' names. That morning, however, the first armored column dashed through Baghdad, and the news of the impending fall of the city eclipsed the Cobra story. After dawn, my wife and I anxiously eyed our front door, as if we could—by will power alone—prevent uniformed Marines from appearing and knocking their sad knock. We debated calling the wife of the pilot who was paired with our son, but did not. It was she, however, who ended our nightmare around 1030, sending an e-mail acknowledging that the downed Cobra was from their squadron but that neither her husband nor our son was involved.
Our relief was palpable, but we had been acutely aware that the best we could hope for in the circumstances was that some other family would be crushed by bad news. The next of kin got off the worry machine first—only to be cast into hell.
There is something wrong with this process. It is intended to ensure that next of kin do not hear of their family member's death in the news first, but it never was intended to create a wide swath of unrelieved fear and concern across the country. The process seems to have been designed for long lead-time print journalism and for the Vietnam-era process of flying videotapes to a transmitting station. Today's instant communications to and from all points of the globe has turned this well-intended procedure into an exercise in sadism.
Nothing in the public's right-to-know doctrine justifies a night and morning such as we experienced. Except for those involved and their families and friends, events such as the fatal Cobra crash were small stories in the context of the entire war. It serves no conceivable national interest to air incomplete news of an event immediately, and it affects the public interest in no substantive way to withhold all news of the event until next-of-kin notifications are complete. I urge the immediate development of a policy that no official announcement of such events be made at all until proper notifications are complete and the entire story can be released.
Lieutenant Commander Sheehan retired in 1987 after 20 years of Navy service.