Word: pooling
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...snow; another is a seven-month fetus on the torso of its disemboweled mother. But it was not just a slaughter of the innocents in Rumania last week. A few days later came another unforgettable image: the fallen dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, executed by a firing squad, a pool of blood by his head...
When Allied troops stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944, American correspondents and photographers were on hand to tell the story. But two weeks ago, when U.S. Marines and Rangers led the charge into Panama as part of Operation Just Cause, not a single journalist accompanied them. The Pentagon- sanctioned pool of reporters did not arrive on the scene until four hours after the fighting began, and they were unable to file their first dispatches until six hours after that. Worse, the initial pool report shed almost no light on the confused military situation, leading off with the hardly titanic news...
Responsibility for that failure lies with the military -- particularly the Defense Department's Southern Command -- not with Komarow or his seven colleagues in the pool. From the time the hastily summoned reporters arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on the night of the invasion until they returned from Panama four days later, the Army kept them under such tight control that journalistic initiative was all but impossible...
...windowless room at Fort Clayton and treated to a tedious, history-laden briefing. Nor were things much better once the poolers were allowed into the sunlight. "To the extent we got any news at all," Komarow says, "it was pretty much by accident." He notes, for example, that the pool did witness looting in Panama City, but only when their military driver lost his way. Exposure to actual combat was also a matter of chance, as when Noriega forces attacked the Southern Command's headquarters, about 400 yards from the press center...
...Kops operation, especially at first," says Kevin Merida of the Dallas Morning News. "The military seemed to have no concept of what our role was. The whole first day was devoted to taking us to places where the action was already over. It was like forming a White House pool and then showing them an empty hall and saying, 'This is where the President spoke...