How Dailies Cover a TV War

By Richard Zoglin

Covering the gulf war is a tough assignment for any journalist, but consider the poor newspaper reporter. Hamstrung by pool restrictions in the field, overshadowed by glamorous TV correspondents, dependent for much of their information on CNN, daily scribes can be excused for feeling a bit underutilized. "A friend took a picture of me the other day taking notes in front of a television set," says Kim Murphy, who is reporting from Saudi Arabia for the Los Angeles Times. "That's what being a war correspondent has come to."

Editors back home are grappling with the same kind of problem. In a story so thoroughly dominated by television, the daily press has been the forgotten news medium. Print journalists, of course, have long recognized that TV has changed the rules of their game. But the gulf war is raising anew tough questions about the newspaper's role in a world where television has become the instantaneous and nearly universal source of breaking news.

Like the TV networks, newspapers jumped into the gulf story with all guns blazing: banner headlines, pages of coverage, reams of special features. And like the networks, they have attracted a bigger audience. The San Francisco Examiner, one of the nation's few remaining afternoon dailies, has seen its street sales increase 25% since the start of the war. Big-city dailies like the Washington Post (circ. 781,000) and the Philadelphia Inquirer (circ. 520,000) have sold 10,000 to 20,000 extra copies a day. "Obviously, our readers see things first and very dramatically on TV," says Post managing editor Leonard Downie. "But the information is fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. We think our readers have an appetite the next morning for having it sorted out."

During the first few days of TV's saturation coverage, newspapers seemed to provide little more than a reiteration of stale news. But the print press has since been playing aggressive catch-up. Last week's most eye-catching scoop came from Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, who reported in the Washington Post that despite the allied air successes, confidential Pentagon assessments revealed that "important parts of Saddam Hussein's war machine have not yet been significantly hurt."

Newspapers with strong international coverage, like the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, have weighed in with stories from around the globe that TV has missed, like a report in the Monitor last week asserting that China had tried to circumvent the embargo against arms shipments to Iraq. Even papers that usually pay little attention to foreign coverage have sent reporters to the gulf region, and several have uncovered fresh news. The San Francisco Chronicle's Carl Nolte, for example, reported last week that some troops at the front are short of key pieces of equipment and basic items like soap. The Los Angeles Times, which has been offering the most extensive and informative daily coverage of the war, has published a steady stream of enterprising features on such topics as the history of Dhahran and the effort by military lawyers to make sure allied troops obey the rules of war. /

To attract an audience conditioned by TV, moreover, newspapers are spicing up their coverage with additional charts, maps, boxes and other visual devices. "This is an editor's story so far," says George Harmon, associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University. "Newspapers have to make sense out of a mountain of information. Packaging is important." The Los Angeles Times is running information boxes atop each page of its daily gulf coverage, containing everything from thumbnail sketches of U.S. battleships to marginalia like the origin of the term "mother of battles" (it comes from an Arabic phrase meaning ultimate battle). The Chicago Tribune ran a full-page, full-color "Young Reader's Guide to the Gulf War." Statistical roundups, "War at a Glance" boxes and Middle Eastern weather maps abound.

The stress on visual packaging and short bursts of information marks another step along the TV-influenced trail blazed by USA Today. But newspapers have also offered thoughtful analysis of the war, often more skeptical than TV's. The New York Times put a notably downbeat spin on General Norman Schwarzkopf's upbeat briefing on the air campaign last Wednesday: "Although ((Schwarzkopf)) presented a picture of a devastatingly effective allied air war against Iraq," the front-page analysis began, "the kind of destruction he described is a slow process and the extent of its success in incapacitating Iraqi ground forces may not be known for weeks." The dailies have also paid more attention to the antiwar viewpoint than TV has, both in their news pages and in commentary by such dissenting columnists as Newsday's Jimmy Breslin.

Media analysts doubt that the war-inspired boost in circulation will reverse the long-term slide in newspaper readership. But print journalists insist that the war is showing what dailies do best. Thomas Winship, former editor of the Boston Globe and now president of the Center for Foreign Journalists, contends, "The newspaper top-to-bottom wrap-up, which was the staple of World War II, has come back into its own. So much is incomplete on TV, newspapers are a godsend to the public." Whether the public fully agrees is far from certain, but despite TV's air superiority in the gulf, newspapers clearly are not ready to concede the field just yet.

With reporting by William Dowell/Dhahran and Leslie Whitaker/New York, with other bureaus