Schanberg Throws Some Verbal Blows p.

By: Allan Wolper Pulitzer Prize winner says press is too passive and concerned about popularity, trades barbs with New York Times bureau chief
SYDNEY H. SCHANBERG, a New York Newsday columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize with the New York Times for his coverage of the Cambodian war in 1975, says the Times and America's other news organizations allowed the Pentagon to push them around during the Gulf war.
"Johnny Apple seemed most worried about getting his people into the best pools," Schanberg said about the Times' Washington bureau chief who ran the Gulf war operations in Saudi Arabia.
He made his comments at a panel discussion entitled "Can we see the forest? Why does [sic] the mass media miss the truth so often?" that drew 150 people at the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference in New York City.
"We threw in the towel during the war," said Schanberg, now an associate editor at New York Newsday. "Throwing in the towel is the one thing we can't do. We have to do everything we can to harass the Pentagon system out of existence."
Apple disputed Schanberg's description of his paper's coverage of the war and its reaction to the Pentagon press restrictions.
"That is not true," Apple said in a telephone interview from his Washington office.
"I put my two best people outside the press pool. Chris Hedges operated completely outside the press pool and won an Ernie Pyle Award.
"Eric Schmidt spent all of his time in Riyadh poking around the innards of the command structure. Some of his stuff was under my byline because I wrote the roundups."
Apple noted that he was not involved in the pool system negotiations but arrived after it had been put into place.
He said his only concern about the press pool was making certain that his reporters were included in news groups that were in combat.
"Sydney wasn't there," said Apple.
Schanberg, told about Apple's comments, said much of war history was written by journalists who analyzed the conflict afterward.
Howard Kurtz, press critic for the Washington Post, detailed some of the Apple-press pool controversy in his new book, Media Circus: The Trouble With America's Newspapers.
"Incensed by the fact that the Times' only pool reporter was not seeing any action, Apple chewed out Colonel Bill Mulvey, the man in charge of the Pentagon's Joint Information Bureau," Kurtz wrote.
Mulvey told Kurtz that Apple threatened to ruin his career and get him fired.
"He was very abusive," Mulvey said of Apple.
"He said I had used everything in my power to favor the competition and keep the New York Times from covering the war."
Mulvey, according to Kurtz, said Apple made a point of saying he would be sitting next to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney at the Gridiron Dinner, an annual media event for Washington politicians and those who cover them.
Apple, who criticized Mulvey in a story he later wrote, denied threatening to get the colonel fired.
"I did say that I would take this up with General Schwartzkopf," Kurtz quoted Apple as saying.
"I was extremely angry. I told him Cheney was an old friend of mine and a sufficiently good friend that he's my guest at Gridiron. I did not say he would be sitting next to me."
Schanberg told the IRE convention that the Gulf war censorship was an outgrowth of press passiveness acquired during the invasions of Grenada and Panama.
He said that after Panama, reporters pledged never to be duped again but still allowed the Pentagon to manipulate them.
"They told us that there we couldn't go to the front because there was no space on the B-52s," Schanberg said. "They could have fit some reporters on those B-52s."
Schanberg said the Pentagon had made the journalists look bad by forcing them to attend daily briefings.
"We allowed ourselves to be placed in the worst possible forums," he said. "We looked like unknowledgeable idiots. We were spoon-fed information at press conferences. The worst possible place for a journalist to be is at a news conference."
He said too many reporters were worried about polls that showed them to be unpopular.
"You get to be popular by being credible," he said. "We'll only be credible by doing our jobs."
Schanberg said he was concerned about President Clinton's appointment of David Gergen to oversee his communications operation.
"He's a nice man but he was there [in the Reagan White House] when they began creating ways to cover the war under controlled conditions."
Schanberg said the press today seems too intent on being popular and worries too much about its image with the public.
"We shouldn't worry about our popularity. If we're credible, we'll be popular," he said.
Schanberg attacked his own newspaper shortly after the Gulf war ended, along with the Times, the New York Daily News and the New York Post for contributing money to welcome-home festivities.
Schanberg resigned from the Times in 1985 to begin writing for Newsday after the paper had dropped his op ed-page column for allegedly attacking superlandlord Donald Trump and various West Side building projects.
Herbert Gans, a Columbia University sociology professor who has long been a media observer, said investigative journalists sometimes limit their search for the truth by honing in on dramatic stories.
"Investigative journalists have to have a villain," he said. "It is like a morality play."
Gans noted that the savings and loan scandal that had begun as a result of deregulation during the Carter administration lay untouched for a long time.
"The S&Ls were allowed to loot, so they looted," he said. "That's what happened during the L.A. riots."
Gans believes that journalists are often kept from learning the truth by the unwillingness of people to be interviewed.
"Journalists depend on sources, but sources don't have to talk," he said. "The power of a source to say no is a limiting factor. Journalists use official sources who have to talk to reporters. If they lie, then it is an official lie. It is amazing how much truth investigative journalists come up with using these methods."