ON WEDNESDAY, I was invited to a panel discussion hosted by Harper’s magazine to discuss issues relating to press coverage of the war on terrorism. This is being written before that panel–but I’ve been reading up on the matter all afternoon, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what we’re going to talk about. The press coverage of the war strikes me as . . . well, fine. I can only assume that, it being a liberal venue, we’re going to be talking about the U.S. military’s efforts to restrict press access to war zones. I expect the starting point for the discussion will be something along the lines of: “The United States gave full access to reporters in World War II and Korea, and only withdrew it after Vietnam, when we lost a war.” Maybe. But other things have changed since those wars. First, the Internet has altered the news cycle. What used to seem like a military excuse for restricting access–that it would “compromise operational security”–has gained considerably more plausibility. A journalist traveling with a platoon in the Mekong Delta in 1969 could not have compromised operational security if he’d had a state-of-the-art field telephone and the worst intentions in the world; no newspaper could have got his reports into print until the next day. Now, any journalist with a laptop can announce U.S. battle plans to the world on www.thwartamerica.com–instantaneously. Second, the nature of journalism has changed. The journalists who landed in Higgins boats with the American troops on D-Day included some excellent writers–from Ernie Pyle to A.J. Liebling–but they were, at the end of the day, propagandists. There was never the slightest chance that any of them would turn his coat and begin defending the Nazi war effort, or even to say that we were wrong in the strategy we chose to oppose it. If the military felt it could rely similarly on the journalists covering the war on terrorism, there would probably be a lot more of them riding along on army copters. Finally, the nature of journalists themselves has changed. The journalists who traveled on John Paul Vann’s press junkets in Vietnam tended to be men of roughly military age. They knew what they were getting into, and a lot of them died. It is somewhat tougher to imagine the military explaining with equanimity the deaths of two or three anchorwomen and CNN correspondents in a firefight. Much as it pains my journalist’s vanity, I suspect that the real reason the Left wants more on-the-ground access to war is the photos and footage, not the writing. Their reckoning is surely that, once the public sees what war is, it will demand a stop to it. It is here that they seem most mistaken of all. Take the 1993 photos from Mogadishu of the corpses of 18 American soldiers dragged naked through the streets. Those pictures seem in retrospect hardly to have dulled the appetite for war. On the terrorist side, Osama bin Laden has said the Mogadishu incident convinced him Americans were a paper tiger. On our side, does it seem more likely that such photos slaked Americans’ desire to stamp out terrorism, or that they stoked it? Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
