| Military adapts to the high-tech news era
Rear Admiral Stephen Pietropaoli ’89 served as the Navy’s top spokesman during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. |
It’s not unusual to find young officers in AU classrooms. The earliest to rise from the School of Communication to become a top military spokesman may have been Kendell Pease ’76, whose first taste of journalism came while guiding reporters around Vietnam. He became a rear admiral and the Navy’s chief of information, long the highest post for a public affairs officer until the creation of Thorp’s job. Most reporters who spent time with the troops in Vietnam, like those he was ambushed with in the Mekong Delta, reported the war objectively, Pease felt. But he looked less kindly on “the ones who covered it from Queens, New York.” By the time Pietropaoli came on active duty in 1977, “the feeling that the media lost the Vietnam War was very prevalent in the military community,” Pietropaoli says. What’s more, the military had some people it didn’t care to introduce to a hostile press. “In the late ’70s and early ’80s, we had a lot of problems with drug use, disciplinary problems, malcontents,” says Pietropaoli, now executive director of the Navy League, a defense policy advocacy and military support organization. Although the all-volunteer force brought a different tone to the military, the distrust toward the press lingered in many quarters—and so did the atmosphere of tight control. In the Navy, says Pietropaoli, “Our rule of thumb for embarking the press was, ‘On board one night, 24 hours, run ’em around, keep ’em busy all the time, and they won’t see any bitching sailors.’” The press was kept at bay. But there was a price. “At the end of Desert Storm, I think the Navy recognized that because we’d been so restrictive, Americans didn’t see much about what we contributed. We were flying flights off six carriers, and there wasn’t much coverage of it.” Then a reporter from a local Virginia paper asked to ride a ship back from Gibraltar to Norfolk. The Navy’s reaction, according to Pietropaoli, was, “Ten days with sailors?!?” But it was approved—and resulted, he says, in a constant flow of thorough and balanced stories. The public got a look at how tax dollars were spent; sailors and their families enjoyed the news clippings; and the benefits of openness with the media grew clearer. “When you’re out there for a longer period of time, if out of a crew of 5,000 there are 50 malcontents, you know it’s a small proportion. The fact is,” says Pietropaoli, “by the early ’90s we’d so turned around the post-Vietnam force, we were OK letting people see their military. We now have individuals at every level who are truly eye-watering in their skills and dedication. It’s a lot easier to be open and accessible when you have a military that’s competent and drug free.” By the time Thorp was heading down the Pentagon hallway for a cup of coffee on September 11, relations between the military and media had vastly improved. Each branch of the service had its public affairs specialists, many of them equipped, like Thorp, with multiple degrees. On top of his AU master’s degree in broadcast journalism and public affairs, he holds a master’s in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College. Thorp had not set out to pursue a military career. A native of Annapolis, Maryland, he had applied to the U.S. Naval Academy in his hometown largely because it was the alma mater of three brothers-in-law. “I knew I wanted to do some kind of public service, and I thought I’d use the experience in the Navy to get my life started,” he says. He put in his required post-Academy years as a surface warfare officer aboard a ship and then interviewed in the business world. That’s when he realized how much he had come to love the Navy. “I enjoyed the camaraderie, and the opportunity to do something bigger than myself. At the end of the day, you look at it, and the measure of what you did is, ‘Did I do the right thing?’ It was just a job that’s bigger than any one person.” He decided, though, to switch to public affairs, where he thought he could make an impact more quickly. It was fairly early in his career when the Navy sent him to SOC. He already knew a lot about the school; two sisters had gone to AU, and he knew the reputation of “the colonel,” former Wall Street Journal reporter and Green Beret Laird Anderson, who taught officers both on and off the AU campus. “There’s a small number of people who’ve influenced my life to an incredible degree,” Thorp says. “One is Laird Anderson, who made an impact and stayed an impact.” He not only taught the reporters’ craft and the value of thinking beyond the deadline. “What Laird Anderson tried to imbue in his students was character and leadership.” After AU, Thorp continued up the ranks. Public affairs in the military looks a lot like the media divisions of any corporation or university—but a whole lot bigger. Officers and enlisted personnel write stories for in-house papers and Web sites, put together television shows for troops on aircraft carriers, and answer questions from the outside press. They’re charged with putting out their employer’s message, but most subjects aren’t controversial. There are features on the unsung heroes of aircraft maintenance, briefings on policies, press releases about classes for spouses. In 2001, body counts weren’t part of the job. That changed after September 11. “There was this huge explosion. It moved me—physically moved my body. We instantly knew we had been attacked. We didn’t know it had been an airplane, but we knew it was an attack,” says Thorp, then special assistant for public affairs for the chief of naval operations. Acrid smoke poured into the corridor. “It seemed like hours, but thinking back, it was probably only seconds,” he says. A number of friends died that day, but everyone with Thorp survived. “I’ll never know what would have happened if we hadn’t gone for coffee. But I do know it wasn’t our time.” It became clearer than ever to military planners after September 11 that speed, flexibility, and the ability to conduct joint operations would be key to military effectiveness in the future. But that vision had not quite become a reality in public affairs when Thorp was ordered to Qatar in 2003 to run the Coalition Media Center for round-the-clock coverage of Iraq. Press would be pouring in from around the globe. Television news would be 24-7. Even print reporters no longer kicked back after nightly deadlines, but scrambled for constant updates for Web pages. In the Vietnam days, Pease recalls that film would be flown first to Manila and then onto U.S.-bound planes. By the 1990s, “we had media on aircraft carriers off Bosnia for three weeks, and we flew off their tapes every night on tactical jets into Rome so it could be uplinked.” But even that was low-tech by 2003, when reporters would expect to hit a keyboard and file instantly. Thorp would also have to deal with a high-pressure news climate that Pease calls “the race to be wrong.” Says the retired admiral, now vice president of communications at General Dynamics, “Everyone talks about the CNN effect—you’ve got to be first. Therefore, you [as a spokesman] have got to get as much out as you can, as quick as you can. Otherwise, there’s speculation.” continued next page >> top |
