Pooled Journalism

The term pooled journalism refers to the journalistic coverage of events, particularly international conflicts and wars, by a comparatively small and therefore controllable group of reporters. In the United States, the Department of Defense (DOD) established in 1987 the so-called DOD National Media Pool as a system designed to control media accessibility to American troops. Consequently, pooled journalism may be defined as a technique of political or military censorship. In a broader meaning, the term pooled journalism is also applied to describe news-gathering organizations pooling their resources in the collection of news. A video pool or pool feed, for instance, is then distributed to members of the pool who are free to edit it.

The setting up of media pools as a method of censorship first came to be used in 1989, when the Pentagon selected about a dozen reporters to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama. These journalists were not permitted to accompany troops into the combat zone but were restricted to an airport in Panama until nearly all fighting ended. The emergence of pooled journalism is connected to tensions between U.S. media and military created in and after the Vietnam War. When the war ended, many in the military blamed the press for “losing Vietnam.” Since then American political leaders and high-ranking military personnel favored tight media policies in subsequent conflicts.

In the second Gulf War, in 1991, the Pentagon authorized several “press pools,” allowing a selected number of reporters to travel to the “front” under the supervision of media escorts, usually U.S. military public affairs officers. News organizations and journalists willing to join the pool system were required to observe numerous ground rules outlining categories of information that could not be reported on (e.g., troop deployments, weapon systems) and spelling out the methods of information gathering that reporters were restricted to. Interviews, for instance, could only be conducted in the presence of a military escort, and [Page 625]pool dispatches had to first pass through the “military security review system” that was organized and controlled by the American military's Joint Information Bureau in Saudi Arabia.

The pool-and-review system later was criticized by scholars and media organizations as an illegal “prior restraint” (censoring of material before its publication) violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, even though a majority of Americans, for the most part, had supported the military's control of the press during the second Gulf War. It took, however, until the 2003 war against Iraq before the U.S. military replaced the system of pooled journalism with current “news management” techniques, including the embedding of journalists into combat troops. Scholars interested in pooled journalism especially described the media pool system as a component of military public relations or looked at the effects of this form of censorship on news coverage.