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The following is a select retrospective of how the media worked the Gulf War and who the big winners and losers were.
- High-tech media coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf was just as revolutionary as the smart bombs and the electronically controlled air battles.
- Half the expert predictions and analyses about the press and the war turned out wrong. Even the Pentagon was wrong on how censorship works, the elite commentators of the press kept misleading each other, and Saddam Hussein was as wrong about the American public as he was about the U.S. military.
- The public’s reactions to all this were just as unpredictable.
- Cable News Network (CNN), C-Span and all the broadcast networks, as well as the print press, covered the congressional “Sanctions versus Military Action” debate fully, which was unusual in itself. The public watched and took part.
- At 6:34 on the evening the air war started, the public watched antiaircraft tracers in the Baghdad sky, as CNN’s Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett, and John Holliman reported live from the enemy capital, another remarkable first. Within hours U.S. flags were flying in front of homes all over the country.
Within days yellow ribbons appeared on door knockers, tree limbs, and car antennas.
- Experts, including a retired chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had been calling for an eventual victory. The retired chairman also predicted 10,000 American deaths. Other predictions included that the allies would run for cover, oil would be $75 a barrel, there would be global economic shock, and the United States would be “politi-
By John R. Whiting
cally divided and economically paralyzed.”
- Television and newspaper reports in the first few hours of the air war made it seem like a Nintendo game already won.
But the public quickly caught on. Soon the pictures on television screens showed airplanes taking off from carrier decks and from Saudi air fields, missiles being fired from the battleships Wisconsin (BB-64) and Missouri (BB-63), and all manner of scenes of U.S. troops in the desert. The public knew, right enough, that the war was real, and the continued broadcasts of CNN’s Peter Arnett from Baghdad filled in details.
- Those who did not subscribe to cable television found CNN broadcasts from the Gulf temporarily available on regular broadcast stations. Generals and colonels in camouflage suits dispensing news and answering questions from hundreds of correspondents replaced normal entertainment broadcasts.
- After five weeks of the air war the Pentagon and the commander-in-chief ended the suspense about the impending ground war by announcing that Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf had been given the go-ahead.
- Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, with expert advice, made his only mistake: two hours before midnight he announced the suspension of the daily news briefings. At 0845 Eastern Standard Time the next morning, General Schwarzkopf was on the air from Riyadh. Reason: the armored divisions, the artillery, and the infantry were already finding out that the air bombardment had worked. “You can’t win a war with air power” was obsolete. The new rule was, “Get on the micro
phone and tell them.”
- Perhaps remembering the adage about “not fighting the last war,” the military re-examined mistakes committed in the Vietnam War in dealing with the press. None of this helped. Hand-held television cameras, folding satellite dishes in panel trucks, 1,600 correspondents swarming over the Gulf area, a CNN so ubiquitous that it was broadcasting every hour from the enemy capital, the vastly different locale for the battles, and news from neutral countries all changed the situation. The highly honed training of the U.S. armed forces was matched by the skills of journalists.
- As for censorship as opposed to criticism of cable news coverage “helping the enemy,” no amount of control in the Pentagon, in Riyadh, or Dharan would have prevented international television crews from working in Baghdad, Cairo, or Amman. If there had been censorship in the United States, it would not have applied to India, Turkey, Israel, Western Europe, or the Soviet Union. Television works past censorship. Television news is with us, and the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
- Some commentators predicted a morale problem. But unlike Vietnam, many morale factors were not involved this time: drugs, alcohol, and a hostile local people, for example. Unlike the leaders in Southeast Asia, the Iraqi enemy publicly announced his own evil often enough so that everyone could focus on him.
- It was a two-front press war: sometimes against the military, more often against parts of itself. When CNN forged ahead, especially as the air war began in January, the print press and
the regular networks sniped.
^hen New York Times television Cr>tic Walter Goodman, normally °n the artistic beat, waxed sarCastic about those briefing offices in battle dress, other writers Praised the authenticity and quality of the briefings.
* The most active see-saw for advantage in the war was between the networks. ABC (and f*eter Jennings) was most often ahead of NBC’s Tom Brokaw and CBS’s Dan Rather. CNN nioved up three notches in the competitive scale. As the war Wound down, the three other networks were worrying about cutting their over-extended budgets, while the CNN people Were expanding theirs. p All networks showed extensive footage of Saddam Hussein. As the ground war started, Time niagazine ran an article about how analysis of his face showed that he was blinking twice as many times a minute compared to his previous rate—a sign to Psychologists of over-stress.
That news item was not censored, of course, and Peter Arnett within a day was reporting from Baghdad that on television transmissions from Iraq there Would be no more closeups of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis Were reading Time.
^ Although the Allied briefings and the reports by correspondents said nothing specific about the war plans for the land offensive, Anthony Cordesman,
ABC’s military analyst, used maps and electronics to show Possible strategies. He predicted nothing that anyone who had studied the campaigns of Civil War Major General William T. Sherman would not have predicted. It turned out Cordesman Was exactly right about the sweep to the west of Kuwait, missing only by calling a Marine beach landing. Censorship of imaginary maps and charts is impossible.
^ In the case of arguments that the Pentagon was censoring the horrors of war, the facts about
censorship and coverage realities are obvious: the media, early on, had no close-up video footage of the bomb damage. But the direct CNN reports from Baghdad, as well as the direct network pictures from Tel-Aviv, were clearly showing the destruction to the world.
- In spite of contentions to the contrary, early reports about Baghdad’s wrecked buildings had no significant or lasting impact on public opinion. Some of that Baghdad footage turned out to be two years old, from the Iran-Iraq War. As the pictures from Tel-Aviv and Kuwait City became available, viewers saw the atrocities in full color. This coverage more than compensated for the onesided early pictures of the suffering Iraqi people.
- For the first time in history, the normal interpreters of the news were not always important parts of the equation. People everywhere ended up seeing live street scenes in Amman, antiaircraft fire in Baghdad, airplanes taking off from the decks of aircraft carriers, bombed apartment houses in Israel, U.S. Marine bulldozers knocking down sand fortifications in the desert, battered war prisoners in Baghdad closeups, Iraqi tanks on fire, Iraqi prisoners marching along hoping for a candy bar.
- The famous correspondents and anchor men at times became in one sense superfluous. Millions of people throughout the world saw the footage. They also got to know the faces and the voices of the briefing officers in a way that has never happened before.
- Comments regarding the various briefers included: “I like Pete Williams! He should run for the Senate!” “Here’s that tough General Neal of the Marines” “Isn’t British Colonel Barry Stevens one of the smartest men you ever saw?” “Did you watch General Schwarzkopf summarize the whole campaign yesterday noon? It’s a good
thing General Powell cancelled his usual briefing . . . good as he is, he didn't stand a chance after that.”
► Wise news-watchers began to notice that between the briefings and the flashes from CNN, they were getting the war in short sound bites. It became necessary to find a news program that now and then summarized the day— or to read the newspapers. Amazingly enough, the major newspapers found many excellent ways to cover the war in depth.
- Although good information came in the early stages of the air war on the carriers and the missile firings from the Wisconsin and Missouri, and a little more on the bombardment in the later stages of the land war, the U.S. Navy just did not have many chances to show its best side.
- The British artillery colonel explaining what the modern rockets, the MLRAs, do was a study in clarity and style.
- Broadcasting from Moscow in an ABC interview with anchorman Jennings, the new age of television intimacy was revealed as Yeorghy Primakov, the Soviet Special Envoy to the Middle East, moved into the familiar, speaking directly to his new friend from 10,000 miles away, saying “Yes, Peter, that’s a good question.” The world was now on a first-name basis.
- The Paris Edition of the International Herald Tribune one day had dispatches from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, Agence France- Presse, the Associated Press, the paper’s own correspondents, and United Press International.
- The 30-minute film documentaries on individual fighting units, done by the U.S. military, and identified as from the pool, were as good cinematic reporting as anything in movie or television history.
- Brilliant and dominating as the TV coverage was, old fashioned still pictures, mostly in color, reached new heights in publications as varied as the Yonkers Herald Statesman (a Gannett paper) and the special issues of Life in Time of War.
- Brigadier General Richard Neal of the Marines, was probably seen more often than any American military man. He earned the respect of the working press on the scene and fortunately did not know that armchair critics back in the States were saying he was “hiding the bad news.”
- The futility of censorship, as well as the frustration of a correspondent who was censored, surfaced in the story of a New York Times man, Malcolm W. Browne. Early in the air war he got the story of the bombing of the Iraqi laboratories used for producing nuclear weapons, direct from the pilots who did it.
But when he asked the Stealth commander for permission to send the news, he was turned down, on security grounds; the job had not been finished.
Browne agreed to keep quiet, and the next day Agence France-Presse scooped everyone by getting details from the staff of a U.S. senator. The Air . Force censorship failed to keep the story under wraps. It just denied it to the reporter who got it first.
► Mike Boetcher was covering a unit of U.S. Marines for CBS.
The system kept him from getting the tapes out—so that story about the Marines was not seen. But there was terrific footage on Task Force Ripper of the Marines, which stormed 30 miles into Kuwait. Eluding the system, David Neal, a combat photographer, and Bob McKeown, both of CBS, got into Kuwait City ahead of the U.S. military, set up their uplink, with its folding satellite dish and generator in a truck, and broadcast interviews with Kuwaiti citizens. They sent their broadcast directly to a satellite 22,000 miles up, and thus directly to CBS ' headquarters in New York.
- One problem the military did not know how to cope with was reporters with too little background. Inept questions at briefings were frequent. One newcomer even asked “Is there a lot of terrain in Kuwait?” One aspect the public did not know about: some people had press credentials but were only vaguely working at real reporting. Their connections got them there.
- Women reporters, both writers and television interviewers, did very well in the total coverage. Betsy Aarons got into Baghdad early. Martha Teichnor did a good reporting job from Saudi Arabia. So did Charlayne Hunter-Gait of the Public Broadcasting System. CBS’s Linda Patillo was first rate. Laurie Lande, just out of the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University; was covering U.S. Navy and Royal Navy stories for the Gulf News from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. She said:
“I quickly learned to break away from the press tours aboard ship and talk to the ordinary enlisted sailors.”
- Since the public was watching live briefings with their question and answer sessions, the normal process of asking sharp, probing questions was probably misunderstood by many viewers, who may have thought the briefers were being too tight-mouthed and the press too ornery. The
newscasters could have done a better job of explaining the normal give and take in the newsgathering process.
- One military event that was broadcast was better than anything any correspondent did: Many commentators said that General Norman Schwarzkopf, in his famous one-hour map talk as he explained how the 100- hour campaign had been won, was as brilliant as the campaign itself.
- As for the battle over censorship and the tension between the press and the services: in a session with U.S. senators, Walter Cronkite advocated giving large numbers of competent journalists access to the action, and subjecting them to military censorship. Pete Williams, who made a name for himself in six weeks as a Pentagon briefer and question-answerer, stated that yes, there had been cases where military officers delayed transmission needlessly, even though officers in the field had cleared them.
Yet, as it turned out, censorship never really, worked, and news organizations never revealed anything significant that the Iraqi Army could use. True, the press was perhaps bamboozled into helping create the illusion of an imminent Marine landing from the sea. The Iraqis were ready for them, with their backs to the real attack.
There is one zinger: As the war was winding down, it seemed that a surprisingly large proportion of the American public thought the truth about the war had not been told, that the government was “covering up,” and the press was “just as bad.” Perhaps time will change that perception, which is in sharp contrast to the other, that “this was the best-covered war in history.”
John Whiting is a freelance writer and retired editor whose work has appeared in Life, the Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, and Harpers.