Soldiers get script for interviews with media
BOISE – The Idaho National Guard wants its soldiers to incorporate five approved “command themes,” including support for the war in Iraq, when speaking to the media.
On the front page of “Snakebite,” the official newsletter of the 116th Brigade Combat Team, the unit’s public affairs officer tells soldiers that referring to the themes “adds continuity to the message we are portraying as a unit.”
Written by Capt. Monte Hibbert, the brief article does not prohibit soldiers from speaking about other issues. But it emphasizes statements of pride in being on active duty, support for the stabilization of Iraq, confidence in the superiority of American troops, commitment to a unified coalition force and appreciation for their families and employers.
“Those themes are the things we feel are consistent with what we’re doing. Those are the messages we want out there right now,” Hibbert said in a telephone interview from Fort Bliss, Texas, where he is training with 2,000 other Idaho National Guard members for a one-year tour in Iraq beginning this fall.
The 116th started deploying soldiers to Texas in early June. Images and interviews with soldiers and their families saturated local television and newspaper coverage in Idaho.
Hibbert said he did not intend to restrict soldiers’ comments to the press.
“We just give them guidelines,” he said. “We encourage soldiers to talk about things in their ‘lane of traffic,’ like their job, what they do in the military, their family. They can talk about how the deployment is affecting them personally, and they’re free to express their opinion.”
But Charles Sheehan-Miles, director of the Washington-based organization Veterans for Common Sense, said that’s not the message that will be perceived by most rank-and-file soldiers.
“I suspect it’s going to be received with a good deal of cynicism,” he said, because the military is increasingly “trying to control the message, because the leaders and the Pentagon have taken a lot of hits on the war, and they want a more positive message.”
But Hibbert’s message does not terribly trouble Val Limburg, a journalism ethics and law professor emeritus at the Edward R. Murrow School of Communications at Washington State University.
“This is more of a public relations kind of thing,” Limburg said. “In private-sector companies, you wouldn’t expect employees to disclose things that might be harmful to their employer. Now if they’re asking them to be deceptive – to cover up something that was wrong – that would be wrong and unethical.”
Still, Limburg wonders whether the military is returning to an era when the military avoided uncontrolled media contacts.
“This seems to be more of a reversion,” Limburg said. “In World War II, we had a War Department and everything was cleared by the government before it went out as news. And the press went along with that because they wanted to win the war, too.”
During the Cold War and as recently as the 1991 Gulf War, contact between rank-and-file service members and the media was generally taboo. Military personnel were instructed to avoid talking to news reporters and to report all contacts to their local public affairs officer.
But Hibbert says the attitude has changed over time, particularly in the last decade and as news technology has changed and reporters have become “embedded” with particular units. Because of the increased contact, even the lowest privates now receive training on dealing with the media.
“We actually try to give them some experience by simulating interviews and role-playing,” Hibbert said.
Sheehan-Miles, whose group is critical of the way the Bush administration has conducted the war, said Hibbert’s message is likely the outgrowth of a natural tendency toward self-protection among soldiers and their units.
But, he said, questions about the administration’s prosecution of the war will not go away despite the military’s attempt to shape opinion.
“There’s certainly a sense that managing the message is not helping the troops,” he said.