Transcript
Scott Shuger
March 17, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Monday night during a joint U.S., British and Kuwaiti exercise a U.S. Navy pilot dropped a 500 pound bomb on an observation post in the Kuwaiti desert, killing six people. This disastrous mistake follows closely upon a National Guard plane crash in Georgia killing 21 on board earlier this month, and the continuing investigation into events on February 9th aboard the submarine Greeneville that caused it to rip apart a Japanese trawler, killing nine. Also last month the collision of two Army Blackhawk helicopters in Hawaii killing six, and then the December crash of the Marine Corps' Osprey aircraft in North Carolina killing four. It seems an appropriate time to review how the news media are covering the U.S. military in these early days of the Bush administration. Joining me now is Scott Shuger who reviews the papers for Slate.com. Welcome back, Scott.
SCOTT SHUGER: Hi, how's it going Brooke?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Let's take the latest incident first --the training mission in Kuwait. Are we finding out everything we need to know about that? How are we covering it?
SCOTT SHUGER: Well I would day we probably haven't found out everything we will find out, and of course behind the list of accidents that you, you recited there's all the other things that go on that haven't resulted in accidents that we find out even less about. That's sort of the typical problem with the military -- operates away from the public eye to a profound degree and it takes a special kind of journalism to uncrack it, and things like accidents are--it's a little late sometimes, but sometimes it's the best way to get into these stories.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's move on to the Greeneville incident -the naval inquiry into why one of our submarines ripped apart a Japanese fishing boat. That inquiry is happening out in the open. Is that motivated by public relations concerns?
SCOTT SHUGER: I don't think so! I think that the American press is a beneficiary of the fact that the Japanese government complained so loudly -- it was such a, a hot button topic in Japan and the Japanese government made such a big noise about it that this got to a level of political sensitivity that m-- made the Navy feel they had to have an open inquiry, and the American public is the beneficiary of that but they shouldn't credit the Bush administration with a new stance on openness I don't think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well when the Greeneville accident first occurred there was a bit of a hue and cry in the media for greater access. CBS Pentagon correspondent David Martin called the Pentagon's initial response a textbook of how not to do it. Has the inquiry calmed the media down at all?
SCOTT SHUGER: I think it probably has calmed the media down-- but I'm a little worried that it's tranquilized the media a little bit, because Martin is right -- if you give the press enough information, they usually go away for a while, and it doesn't have to necessarily be the right information.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now the incident with the Osprey aircraft which has proven to be a pretty unreliable piece of equipment; we heard last week emotional public testimony by the relatives of four of the 19 servicemen that were killed aboard an Osprey last April. I saw a retired general interviewed on MSNBC and he said this is the military; accidents happen. Has the press bought that line?
SCOTT SHUGER: Well they probably wouldn't admit that they've bought it, but I think functionally they sort of have. There are some big problems with the coverage. First of all if the military can say, convincingly, that for a given accident or a set of accidents it wasn't the tilt rotor feature of the airplane that caused the accident, then a sloppy reporter concludes and a sloppy editor concludes and maybe even presents a story in such a way that it looks as though it's pilot error, even if nobody comes out and says it. But in fact there are other things in the plane besides the design, and for instance the last accident, the military finally admitted that it was the hydraulics and the software! And another problem -- and this is a longstanding problem with the press -- is that they really should get more into the actual sources of information around town on things like this, and the best source of information on the Osprey comes out of the General Accounting Office which has covered this program for many years with detailed reports. And what's happened lately is that the Washington Post has jumped on the GAO reports a little bit and I'm afraid that therefore the other papers have sort of looked for other angles to cover when that's really the, the right angle for this story.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The list that I recited at the beginning of this interview -- it sounds like there's a terrible problem with safety in the military. Is that fair, or is the number of accidents pretty much constant?
SCOTT SHUGER: Actually I think probably studies could prove that the military safety records have improved; that you could go back 10 or 15 years and find higher accident rates in submarines, in, in surface ships and airplanes. But I still think that the press is not wrong to be focusing on this because there are special features of our submarine-civil visiting program; there are special features of the Osprey that, that require investigation. But it is in fact true that the reason the press has gotten into this story is fallacious. I mean they're not reporting on all the number of people who have taken off and landed or dropped bombs in exercises during this whole time frame that you used when everything went right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We've been talking about how the-- the press operates. Let's talk about how the military is dealing with the press. I mean they put out misinformation that wasn't corrected during the Gulf War for a long time. Now those same Gulf War leaders -- Dick Cheney and Colin Powell are running things now. Is there any evidence that they won't put out exactly the same kinds of messages?
SCOTT SHUGER:No, I think this is a huge worry. After all Dick Cheney was running the Pentagon during the time that General Schwarzkopf and other senior officers in the Pentagon were giving all those briefs proving that the Patriot missiles were knocking all those Scuds out of the sky, and it took several years of research to find out that actually probably none of them ever did that, and the press has never called Dick Cheney on this, and-- I would worry very much about his tendency to shade the truth in the-- in a future situation regarding the, the military.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thank you very much!
SCOTT SHUGER: Sure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Scott Shuger writes the Today's Paper column for Slate.com.