Army Times - March 8, 2003
'Lights. Camera. Action.' Military briefers prepare for war
With 800 journalists in the field, and a dazzling new set at HQ, war will test whether 'transformation' in military-media relations is real
By Robert Hodierne Times staff writer
CAMP AS SAYLIYAH, Qatar In a warehouse that until a few weeks ago housed American tanks and armored vehicles, which are now in Kuwait preparing for a war against Iraq, a Hollywood set designer is overseeing feverish efforts to complete a $200,000 stage in time for military briefers to deliver news of that war to gathered reporters and a worldwide television audience.
The glitzy, high-tech set, half as wide as a basketball court, features a soft focus blue and white map of the world as its backdrop. Hanging from industrial gray steel stanchions and girders will be five 50-inch and two 70-inch plasma video screens. The TV screens will display all manner of video, computer images, maps and just about anything else officers from America's Central Command might want to show.
This set will have more audio-visual bells and whistles than anything in the White House or the Pentagon.
In fact, said a technician flown here from the White House to install the electronic gear, "this totally sets a whole new standard to present information."
It's all a far cry from the hotel ballroom with its easel and a single TV set sitting on a cheap stand that Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf used in Saudi Arabia when he dazzled reporters during Desert Storm with action videos of smart bombs plunging with eerie precision into bridges and airplane hangers.
The designer of this high-tech, high-impact set is George Allison, 43, whose last major credit was art director for the Mike and Kirk Douglas movie "It Runs in the Family." He also designed the $89 million set for ABC's "Good Morning America." More important, he has designed stage settings for appearances by President George W. Bush.
"It's about bringing the level of technology up from the flip chart to the modern age," Allison said as he sat, paint spattered on his arms and hands, watching the final touches on his set. "It's trying to send a very clear message about technology and the use of it."
Air Force Col. Ray Shepherd, director of public affairs for Central Command, said, "We use the latest technology in our military operations. It's only fitting we use it here."
Besides, he said, most Americans get their news from television and are used to a certain level of visual sophistication. "We want to come as close as we can to the standards they're used to seeing on television," he said.
As a symbol of the American military's growing media sophistication, you couldn't do better than the briefing room/TV set. The set is part of a 17,000-square-foot media center that will host journalists not just from America but from every European country, China, Japan and even the Arab TV network al-Jazeera, which some in the military refer to as the enemy station. Not only do these journalists speak a babel of foreign languages, they use a babel of television systems. Not to worry. The military technicians in the media center will be able to convert any form of video into any other of the world's formats. On the spot.
Images provided by the military will be fed by microwave signal to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 12 miles away. And from there, satellite antennas from all the major media will beam the military's message around the world.
Print media will have it harder. Phone lines for filing stories are in short supply. There are no high-speed Internet connections.
But if the TV set up seems a bit slick, there is also at work here a fundamental change in philosophy that may alter even more dramatically than the bells and whistles what it is the world will learn of this war.
During Desert Storm, journalists were kept on short leashes by their military media handlers. Access to frontline troops was rare. The generals running Desert Storm came of age during the Vietnam War and their tight control over the media was a reaction to news coverage in Vietnam where unfettered media access to the troops resulted in what many in the military saw as unfairly critical coverage. There grew up a glass wall between the civilian media and the military.
This time around, more than 800 journalists will live in the field and onboard ships with the 250,000 soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who are expected to take part in the war. At no time in Vietnam were that many reporters and photographers in the field with troops even though there were twice as many troops as here in the Arabian Gulf.
"We're hoping to break new glass," Shepherd said. He said the journalists "will come to know the people who are representing them and defending their country."
With that, of course, comes the risk that they will write stories about the inevitable screws up and tragedies that occur in war. But Shepherd believes that because the journalists will have lived with the people they are writing about, such stories will have "the perspective of how the unit works" and how hard they strive to avoid mistakes.
While Shepherd says the media are too professional to lose their objectivity about the troops they will live with and write about, others aren't so certain.
Sydney H. Schanberg, who covered Vietnam for the New York Times, told the trade publication Editor & Publisher, "It's hard for any reporter to be aggressively critical of someone you're bonding with."
Shepherd says the pressure for this transformation in media relations came from public affairs officers in the field and worked its way up. The change seems all the more remarkable in a Defense Department whose hallmark has been tight control of information. The message, as it's called.
"I can't tell you how much high-level support we're getting for this," Shepherd said. One reflection of that high-level interest: Central Command's "strategic communicator" is Jim Wilkinson, who came over from his job as deputy communications director at the Bush White House.
It was Wilkinson who dreamed up the stretched canvas backdrops that appeared behind Bush with key phrases printed on them: Strengthen Medicare, A Home of Your Own, Corporate Responsibility. And it was Allison who designed them.
Allison's set in the Qatar briefing room has had its share of glitches. He was told the ceiling would be 15 feet high and he designed the set accordingly. When he arrived he found the ceiling was only 11.5 feet high. The stage was lowered.
One more measure of how important the military thinks the appearance of this stage is. Most of the set was built in Chicago and then sent by Federal Express to Qatar. At a cost, Allison said, of $47,000.
But the final measure of how little may have changed in military-media relations is this: Unnamed Defense Department officials ordered the Central Command public affairs officers to bar photographs of the set while it was under construction. No explanation was offered.