18 Oct 2001

Flagging service issues

Stars and Stripes, the daily tabloid for US military personnel, prides itself on its independence, writes Eric Ellis

 "To publish an independent and unbiased newspaper of the highest quality that serves the US military community overseas in peace and war" - The mission statement of Stars and Stripes.

TOM Kelsch has an image problem that will never be solved. He publishes the American daily tabloid Stars and Stripes, whose $US33 million ($66 million) a year operating budget comes mostly from the US Defence Department. Stripes reports on US military affairs. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is ultimately Kelsch's boss via a chain of command through the American Forces Information Service, the Pentagon's propaganda unit. Stripes's Washington newsroom is a short drive from the battle-scarred Pentagon.
As a de facto US government agency, the newspaper can't seek freedom of information material, publish editorials or endorse political candidates. Stripes is wholly owned by the Pentagon. So in this defining moment for the world's media, as debates about censorship swirl around, if Kelsch's paper looks like the US military, smells like the US military and feels like the US military, then surely it is the US military? And accepts the reporting restrictions, and "patriotic" requirements demanded of it in wartime? "I've got 100 or so very professional reporters who would probably go to battle with anyone who suggested we are a propaganda rag," says Kelsch, a civilian media veteran, and publisher of Stars and Stripes since 1996. He is only half-joking. "We cover a story like any mainstream newspaper. Yes, we are owned by the Pentagon, but we are not the official publication of the US military."
So when managing editor Doug Clawson heard the news of the first strike on New York's World Trade Centre on September 11, he was doing what most editors do at that hour: sipping coffee, comparing his paper to others and planning coverage of what was shaping as an unremarkable day for the American military.
Horrified, Clawson tuned to CNN. "I'm not clairvoyant or anything but I had this sense even after the first tower was hit that something was very wrong," he recalls. "I'm thinking this is no accident. I knew something very, very bad was happening."
Barely an hour later, another plane flew into The Pentagon, striking the side opposite Stripes's Pentagon office. Correspondent Sandra Jontz, another civilian, rushed to the scene. Trained in emergency medical services as well as photo-journalism, she filed stories, took pictures and administered first aid to burns victims. "I treated one guy, he had second and third degree burns over 80 per cent of his body," Jontz reported in Stripes's September 12 edition. "Triage was chaos, too many people were trying to call the shots." As neighbouring buildings were evacuated, Clawson thought, "How do I get the paper out without an office?" He decided to stay put.
Since then, Clawson has sent reporters to Uzbekistan and Pakistan, and brought some back from Germany to cover the "front line" in New York and at the Pentagon. He anticipates he will soon send a reporter to Afghanistan.
The newspaper routinely has reporters in places like Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Turkey, Macedonia and Guam. After a mid-1990s purge of brass, about 90 out of a total of 102 editorial staffers are civilians.
First published during the American Civil War, Stripes today prints in Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea, where the US military has its biggest foreign presence. In peacetime, stories are about life on US bases, which function as small American cities on foreign soil.
Typical readers are servicemen and their families, career officers and retired personnel. "We are at our most popular when the military tells our readers one thing and then we report what's really going on," Kelsche says. Circulation, he says, "has spiked up pretty nicely" since September 11, from about 60,000 to between 70,000 and 80,000.
But Stripes also covers areas a Pentagon always anxious about morale would prefer left alone. Last year, it broke the story about Lieutenant-General Claudia Kennedy, the army's highest ranking woman, who was "touched in a sexual manner" by Major-General Larry Smith when they were both two-star generals. The 1996 incident became public when Smith was promoted to a position overseeing such cases. Soon after, Smith was retired for "conduct unbecoming an officer".
In Bosnia, Stripes exposed serious morale problems with the US peacekeeping mission. One story detailed the frequent unwanted pregnancies of female personnel, another claimed some military pay cheques were "made of rubber". The newspaper has exposed barracks racism and writes frequently about job and budget cuts.
Stripes also reports the seedier side of military life, such as rapes and murders involving US soldiers based in Japan and Korea. Or the plight of Amerasian children in the Philippines and Vietnam, who've never known their fathers.
Another Stripes scoop last year reported the attempt by Linda Tripp (who exposed US president Bill Clinton's affair with former Whitehouse intern, Monica Lewinsky) to transfer her $US100,000 a year job from the Pentagon to Germany. Tripp, fired soon after and now jobless, claims she was set up by Pentagon heavies, which Clawson denies.
But the paper has its own scandals that cast doubt on its claims to editorial independence. Last year, civilian editor David Offer resigned after Kelsch pulled a story about a Patriot missile unit being prepared for deployment in Israel. A similar story appeared the same day in The Washington Post, and was subsequently published by Stripes.
Kelsch cites a Pentagon directive that prohibits Stripes from publishing classified information, but not stories published elsewhere. He still won't, or can't, talk about the incident but insists he is a vigorous defender of press freedom.
To those who doubt Stripes's autonomy, Kelsch paraphrases the US Constitution: "America is ultimately about freedom and liberty, and our military exists to defend that way of life, which includes the freedom of the press. On many days, the military would probably like to close us down because of some of the stories we publish about them but at the end of the day our military will also place themselves in harm's way defending that freedom. But sadly, not too many people outside the Pentagon believe that."