by Gary Gilson
Newsworthy 2001

The history of war reporting is as varied as battlefield terrain. The evolution of technology from print to radio and television to today’s instant satellite and Internet reporting has helped shape war reporting. And government restrictions affect what reporters are able to report.

The practice of news writing in the days of the Vietnam war also underwent crucial changes that affected the way news was delivered. Here is a rare look inside change in a major news organization’s structure and decision-making.From the outset of the war in Afghanistan, many news organizations in the United States have complained about Pentagon restrictions on access to the battlefield. Some media outlets, stung by criticism that they supinely accepted propaganda from the Pentagon in the Gulf War (miraculous missiles that never missed their targets), want to show their independence. Other media outlets have allied themselves with the patriotic surge; they help create a climate in which reporters who seek the truth are sometimes portrayed as unpatriotic.

The public seldom gets a candid description from an authoritative media manager of how news is gathered, written and edited. A recent posting on the Internet illuminates some of the most significant (and wrongheaded) war reporting in modern times: coverage of the war Time magazine loved — Vietnam.

Time’s founder, Henry Luce, was a model Cold Warrior. His opinions dominated Time’s reporting, aided by Time’s editorial structure (since changed).

Richard L. Duncan, newly retired from Time and once its Chief of Correspondents, recently described for his college classmates’ e-mail chat room the way things worked:

Time initiated the Group Journalism system (Newsweek copied it), in which news gathered by correspondents in the field landed on the desk of a writer in New York, who had "full authority," Duncan wrote, "to make the best story he could out of all the sources available to him — correspondents’ files, newspaper clips, research from the researcher, and his or her own writing ability.

"Some writers were rigorously journalistic about their use of [correspondents’] files. Others tended to confect, or to lurch the story down a line they presumed the editor wanted. The correspondent’s best friend was the researcher, who had the authority to hold the writer to the checkable truth. But researchers — at that time, mostly women, mostly very well educated, but without journalistic experience — couldn’t force writers to include balance, very often."

A couple of Time reporters covering the Vietnam War quit in protest against what they considered the distortion that writers in the New York home office incorporated into their stories. Duncan says that soon after they quit, Time went through a gradual turnaround:

"A fresh band of reporters went to Saigon, protected by Dick Clurman, the Chief of Correspondents, and continued to report what they saw and found. The situation improved so that, by the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the reporting was so accurate and unanimously critical of the war that the magazine had little chance to squirm out of accurate reporting.

"Henry Grunwald (the new editor) took a more balanced view of the war. Luce retired, and Hedley Donovan (his successor) ordered a whole re-examination of Time’s and Life’s positions and coverage.

"The fact is that [the reporters’ resignations] brought to light a serious flaw in the newsmagazine system. Writers could and often did pick out the reporting they liked, and ignore the rest. Grunwald began a "comments and corrections" system, under which finished stories were telexed back to reporters in the field for their review.

"That led to some beautiful fights, and I’m proud to say I was in the thick of a number of them. By the time I became Chief of Correspondents in 1978, we had begun emphasizing ‘writing from the field,’ a practice which used writers and editors only to police up reporters’ prose. The style suffered a bit, and the stories got longer, but then reality was never quite as simple as Time’s editors wanted it to be."