cercasi traduttore...

[Carlo Gubitosa <c.gubitosa@peacelink.it>]

Qualcuno puo' tradurre?

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Fonte: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/international/middleeast/18MEDI.html?ex=1046560179&ei=1&en=a156b1671c65eb9d 


Journalists Are Assigned to Accompany U.S. Troops

February 18, 2003
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and JIM RUTENBERG

For the first time since World War II and on a scale never
before seen in the American military, journalists covering
any United States attack on Iraq will have assigned slots
with combat and support units and accompany them throughout
the conflict.

The media mobilization, requiring vast logistical planning
of its own, involves at least 500 reporters, photographers
and television crew members - about 100 of them from
foreign and international news organizations, including the
Arab network Al Jazeera.

It promises to offer the American public and the world at
large a front row seat to a war that could begin within
weeks. It also raises complex new questions about
journalistic rules of engagement, like how to make sure a
family back home does not get the first notification that a
relative has been wounded or killed by seeing it on
television.

How to maintain military secrecy with an army of
electronics-packing journalists is another issue. "They
don't want to have live television coverage of a convoy of
tanks moving up the Basra-to-Baghdad highway that would
tell the Iraqis where those tanks are," said Eason Jordan,
chief news executive of CNN.

According to a Pentagon document outlining some of the
rules of journalistic engagement, reports of live,
continuing action cannot be released without the permission
of the commanding officer.

There will be strict prohibitions on any reporting of
future operations or postponed or canceled operations, the
document further states. The date, time and place of
military action, as well as the outcomes of mission
results, can be described only in general terms. Other
ground rules remain to be spelled out.

Yet both the Pentagon and news executives welcomed the
initiative. It is a sharp about-face from the restrictive
news policies the Pentagon has maintained since the Vietnam
War, which to many commanders showed the psychological
perils of broadcasting a war into the nation's living
rooms. In the Persian Gulf war, for example, only pool
reporters were given regular front-line access.

"In many ways this is going to be historic," said Brian
Whitman, the deputy Defense Department spokesman and a
former special forces major who is directing the effort to
place reporters in the individual units. Even on D-Day in
World War II, he said, no more than 30 or 40 journalists
went in with invading American forces, although many others
later ended up traveling with United States units. In
Vietnam, reporters visited forward bases and went out on
operations but were not assigned to particular outfits.

Whether the Pentagon's policy change was in any part an
effort to counter anticipated Iraqi claims of American
atrocities or self-sabotage attributed to the invaders was
not clear. But Mr. Whitman said it had the full support of
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B.
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Some television news executives said they knew access could
come with a price. Dan Rather, the CBS news anchor, voiced
concern that the Pentagon could make it hard to get certain
images out if they tell a story other than the one the
Pentagon wanted told.

"A lot of people said the right things," Mr. Rather said
during a recent presentation on network war coverage plans.
"In the fog of war, these things have a way of changing."

Last week, the Pentagon allocated the slots to newspapers,
news agencies and television networks. This week the
organizations are to report the names of correspondents
selected to fill the assignments so they can be offered the
same inoculations against smallpox and anthrax already
given to fighting forces. The Pentagon has already trained
232 of the journalists for combat conditions in four
separate weeklong boot camps on domestic military bases
and, conveying the Bush administration's sense of urgency,
has "run out of time" to train more, Mr. Whitman said.

The journalists will not be allowed to carry or fire
weapons. Unlike many World War II and Vietnam
correspondents, they will not wear military-issue uniforms,
although they can buy their own fatigues. They are to
provide their own helmets and flak jackets but will be
given so-called NBC gear to protect against nuclear,
biological and chemical attacks. They will also share their
units' transport, food and accommodations, such as they
are.

"There's no cost for the six feet of ground they'll lay on
and the rations, although they may not like them," Mr.
Whitman said. The journalists are forbidden to have their
own vehicles.

Iraq may be preparing its own media offensive, said Peter
Arnett, the television reporter, who a dozen years ago was
a last lonely Western voice broadcasting on the only
satellite phone from Baghdad for CNN during the 1991 war.
Now, he said, as he goes back for National Geographic
Explorer and MSNBC, there are 200 to 300 satellite phones
in Baghdad, and a dozen video uplinks and video phones.
"I've got far more competition," he said.

The logistics of arranging the media deployments were every
bit as daunting as some of the military planning, Mr.
Whitman said. Slots were awarded based on circulations and
markets served. Major papers in Boston, San Francisco,
Atlanta and Houston, for example, received four to six
slots each, which could be filled in part with freelancers.


No slot was awarded specifically to anyone writing a book,
although some journalists, as in the past, would probably
also write books. The assignments were as open to women as
to men.

Reaction to the new policy among journalists was clearly
positive, if cautious.

David Halberstam, who was stationed in South Vietnam for
The New York Times starting in 1962 and who won a Pulitzer
Prize in 1964, called the new arrangement a welcome change
since 1991, "given the controls last time, which were
excessive." But the crucial issue, he said, was access:
"Can you get where you want?"

He said reporters would benefit from close proximity to the
troops. "Soldiers will always talk to reporters with them
in the field," he said. "The grunt has an inalienable right
to tell the truth."

Donatella Lorch, a correspondent for Newsweek who covered
wars in Africa, the Balkans and Afghanistan, where she
spent a week in a Special Forces unit, said the new policy
"brings up a lot of issues for reporters." She said they
would be under considerable pressure to remain critical and
independent in the face of troops they were living with
every day.

Mr. Arnett said it remained to be seen how quickly
reporters in the field, even with the new access, would be
allowed to put out their reports. If they were held up for
clearance, he said, the reporters could end up being
scooped by their colleagues at a Pentagon briefing. But
nothing, he said, could equal the opportunity to be close
to combat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/international/middleeast/18MEDI.html?ex=1046560179&ei=1&en=a156b1671c65eb9d