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Confusing US briefings frustrate news media

REUTERS, Doha/Washington
One US television network has already voted with its feet and reduced its staff.
Many journalists at the main US headquarters for the Iraq war say they get plenty of spin but little news.
A reporter for New York magazine, frustrated at the lack of light being shed on the war, asked this question last week to applause from colleagues:
"Why should we stay? What's the value to us for what we learn at this million-dollar press center?"
Journalists from Britain, Washington's chief ally in the war, feel so starved of information in Qatar that they have put up a sign quoting this remark at a briefing by British forces commander Air Marshall Brian Burridge:
"We don't do detail."
US broadcasters CNN, NBC and CBS all said they sent relatively small teams to As Sayliya Camp, the US Central Command forward headquarters on the bleak outskirts of Doha's capital, Qatar, and had no plans to scale back.
Fox was not available for comment and ABC said it did not discuss staff levels. One network executive, however, said privately that it had withdrawn around a dozen people.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the executive said, most of the news on how the conflict with Iraq was going for US-led forces came from the main briefing center and US commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
"Now with all the embedded journalists (attached to US and British units) the briefings are much more reactive to the main news of the day," the executive told Reuters
And some recent briefings have either been ignored by television networks or liberally cut away from in favor of more compelling news than the sight of US officers saying little more than that the controversial invasion is "on plan."
An official from another network put it like this: "They are playing catch-up sometimes and that somehow reduces the value."
Around 600 journalists, known by the Pentagon as "embeds," are attached to US and British military units and often report on frontline developments long before Doha, Washington or London know what is going on.
More than 700 journalists are accredited in Doha. Many are becoming openly contemptuous of the daily proceedings that US General Tommy Franks, in one of only two appearances since the war began, called a "platform for truth."