"War has begun in the Middle East," Dan Rather told his viewers at 7:05 p.m. on January 16. Operation Desert Storm had begun just in time for the nightly news -- according to plan.
Some will no doubt remember this as the "CNN War" -- due to the journalistic (some will say propagandists) coup that enabled the Cable News Network to remain in Iraq throughout the Gulf war. CNN's audience reached nearly 11 million people -- almost 10 times higher than normal for the 10-year-old network, outdistancing the conventional networks in some cities and at least temporarily displacing Fox as the "fourth major network."
The news that first week saturated the airwaves and drew the undivided attention of the nation. In bars televisions that are typically tuned to sports events were transfixed on the news of the war, while offices were equipped with portable TV sets and shortwave radios. TV weather maps suddenly included Riyadh and Dhahran as well as Chicago and San Francisco.
Psychologists warned that watching too much war news could lead to what has been called the "CNN Complex" -- a kind of battle viewer (or listener) fatigue with symptoms such as insomnia and depression as well as the inability to focus on work.
"WHATEVER VIEWERS' FEELINGS about the proper U.S. policy in the Gulf, no one could complain about not having access to enough information," observed New York magazine's Edwin Diamond.
But have we really gotten the full story? Many media observers -- and journalists who have been attempting to cover the Gulf war -- believe we haven't. "There is a beast of war out there ... we're trying to describe," ABC's Forrest Sawyer told Nightline host Ted Koppel. "Based on the information given, we're about at the toenail range." Koppel acknowledged that "we've been watching the war through black-and-white footage from the nose cones of guided missiles."
In fact, some observers see the Bush administration managing the war -- and the press -- much in the same way the Bush presidential campaign was handled in 1988. The carefully selected photo opportunities then (remember Bush's visit to the flag factory?) have simply been replaced by the Pentagon's video press releases showing "pinpoint bombing missions" against Iraqi targets and photo opportunities at military bases back home.
"There is a strong link between the way Lee Atwater and Co. managed the news [during the campaign] and the Pentagon today," says Jim Naureckas of the New York-based media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR). "If you only give [the TV networks] images that will reflect positively on the U.S. military, those will be the images broadcast to the American people."
The main difference in this time of war is that the media truly hasn't had much in the way of an alternative -- at least in its coverage of actual combat. Journalists covering the Persian Gulf war work under the constraints of the strictest media guidelines ever applied by the Pentagon during wartime.
The controversial media "pool" system -- small groups of reporters traveling under the watchful eye of Pentagon press escorts -- is in effect, which means the U.S. military shows journalists only what it wants to be communicated. (In the case of Panama, press pools were not allowed to the front until after the invasion was staged.) And all press reports must first pass through military hands for a security review -- in other words, they are censored just like the reports coining out of Baghdad.
The veteran CBS correspondent Bob Simon (who at press time was reportedly being held somewhere in Baghdad) had repeatedly criticized the press restrictions and Pentagon efforts to "sanitize" coverage before he and the crew broke away to the front on their own. "The [military] brass is still convinced that the press had a lot to do with the political fallout from the [Vietnam] War," Simon told USA Today the day before the war started. "So they are trying to do what they can to prevent those things from happening again."
THE PENTAGON'S RESTRICTIONS have left more than 700 reporters based in Saudi Arabia looking to the U.S. military for news -- an "absolutely ideal situation from the military's point of view," according to former Navy Secretary James Webb. With a captive audience, the U.S. military has gladly taken on the role of executive producer for the networks by providing the bombing video of the day accompanied by the official version of Operation Desert Storm.
As a result, the media became mesmerized those first few weeks by the seemingly flawless display of high-tech weaponry such as the Patriot missile. CBS's Jim Stewart referred to the "almost picture-perfect assaults" witnessed in the first days of the war, while Charles Osgood of ABC described the bombing of Iraq as a "marvel."
The coverage of the war and the Super Bowl (which was part pep rally for the war) was almost indistinguishable, as we witnessed New York Giants players and coalition pilots returning from bombing missions exchanging high fives after their "touchdowns" on the same TV news broadcast. Dan Rather pronounced, "In sports-page language ... so far, it's been a blowout." And the newspapers would not be left out of this "go-team" wave of coverage: A New York Times article on Super Bowl Sunday was titled "Patriots vs. Scuds: Iraqi Touchdown is Averted."
It's coverage like that which gives new meaning to the term "pack journalism" -- and removes us even further from the human costs of war. A couple who was heading into a movie theater to watch a comedy was asked by CBS News why they picked that particular movie. They replied, "We were going to see Flight of the Intruder, then we said, 'Hell, we're seeing that every night on TV.'"
"It's the ultimate in life-as-entertainment instead of life-as-reality," observed Atlanta psychiatrist Patrick T. Malone, of the way the war was being presented on television. "As a therapist, I find this extremely disturbing about our culture."
According to an administration official quoted in U.S. News and World Report (which could almost serve as the official viewing guide for the war, it's so gung-ho), Bush is convinced that Operation Desert Storm can proceed without interruption if the American public gets in the habit of "listening with one ear" to news of the war. On the other hand, as U.S. News' own editor-at-large David Gergen has pointed out, the president could be in for a rude awakening "if the government continues to try and sell the American public on an antiseptic war."
ANY IMAGE OF AN ANTISEPTIC war that remained almost a month into Operation Desert Storm vanished once Americans witnessed the carnage from the February 13 bombing of an apparent bomb shelter where hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed. As The Boston Globe observed in an editorial the following day, the tragedy served "as a wake-up call for any who have nodded off in reveries of Nintendo war."
The horror of war was brought into our living rooms for the first time since Vietnam, as we watched the charred bodies pulled out on blankets and placed in rows outside the still smoldering inferno and listened to the cries of grieving Iraqi witnesses and relatives. "This is the product of your democracy!" cried out one grieving man filmed by ABC, who said he'd lost his entire family in the bombing.
But while the bombing was a graphic reminder for some Americans of the immorality of the war, it intensified an already brewing public backlash against the U.S. media in Baghdad -- CNN and Peter Arnett in particular -- for being a "mouthpiece" for Saddam Hussein. "We have the picture of an Iraqi woman ranting and raving about the bombing of Baghdad," read one letter to The Washington Post. "Why not show in the telecast the sorrow and weeping of a woman who suffered the rape of Kuwait?"
While it is true there is much we haven't seen (due to censorship from both sides), I couldn't help wondering whether we would see such a backlash if CNN showed "ranting and raving" residents here in Washington if Iraq somehow managed to bomb the nation's capital. In any case, it seems that blaming the messenger has once again become one of America's favorite pastimes.
MEANWHILE, the debate over the Pentagon's press restrictions has intensified -- at least in newsrooms and on op-ed pages. While Americans by and large have seemed satisfied with the amount of news they're receiving -- and with the Pentagon's censorship of that news -- according to polls, some journalists and media outlets have been actively resisting what they see as excessive Pentagon control over the coverage of the war.
A suit pending (at press time) in a New York federal court, filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights in January on behalf of several publications (including The Nation, In These Times, and Harper's) and individual journalists, challenges for the first time the press restrictions imposed by the Pentagon.
The press restrictions have contributed to what Mim Udovitch of The Village Voice called "how-we-will-win" rather than "why-we-are-there" coverage of the war, leaving little room for dissent. When voices of dissent have been aired, they have been an occasional dissonant note in a chorus of media boosterism.
When a panel of editors from around the country was asked by PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour to give a brief analysis of the "success" of the war thus far, Erwin Knoll of The Progressive responded by turning the question on its head: "What is a success or failure in this war? Is the fact that more people are being killed a success?" A few seconds of dead air-time followed before they went on to the next question.
And while Vice President Quayle has berated the press for spending too much time on anti-war demonstrators, coverage of those who oppose the war has been largely vacuous and marginalizing. On the evening of the January 26 march in Washington, DC (which drew more than 200,000 people), the networks gave equal time to the 300 counterdemonstrators. And, typically, there was little if any air time given to the speakers who represented different constituencies of the anti-war movement.
However, the networks did broaden their initial narrow coverage of the flag- and car-burners to show the breadth of nonviolent opposition to the war -- veterans, students, military families, and church people among its ranks. And the mainstream press appears to understand that it is possible to oppose the war policy and still support the troops and our country. "Let's not make the same mistake we did in Vietnam by somehow calling those [protesting] in the streets unpatriotic," Walter Cronkite cautioned to Dan Rather the first week of the war.
Another bright spot has been the cable network C-SPAN, which has provided viewers with a range of dissenting voices as part of its wonderfully balanced coverage. Where else would you find guests such as Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy, The Nation's Christopher Hitchens, and Mother Jones's editor Doug Foster, as well as full coverage of a press conference called by Pax Christi and Sojourners.
Not the conventional networks. In the five months leading up to Operation Desert Storm, nightly news programs devoted approximately 1 percent of their air time to popular opposition to the U.S. military buildup in the Gulf, according to a FAIR survey.
Media coverage of the church's opposition to this war and the debate around the fundamental moral questions regarding our involvement in the Gulf was largely stifled (along with much of the country's dissent) once we went to war -- that is, until Bush began declaring Operation Desert Storm a "just war." That led to a spate of newspaper and magazine articles examining whether the traditional just war theory applied to modern wars such as this one.
And while theologians from different denominations and traditions offered their views to the media, a MASH medic interviewed by NBC News in Saudi Arabia may have said it best: "We may be moral and just, but war is never right."
Brian Jaudon was news editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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