John R. MacArthur, the young publisher of Harper’s magazine, spent his war, as it were, in the courts. A few days before the bombing of Baghdad began, he joined with a few other “small, primarily left-wing weeklies and monthlies” to test the constitutionality of the Pentagon’s rules for coverage. The suit eventually was dismissed, but MacArthur has now filed a provocative, well-honed polemic, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (260 pages. Hill and Wang. $20).
MacArthur’s allegations are explosive. He sketches a mostly credulous, barely competent corps of correspondents who embraced the administration’s goals (when they could be discerned), swallowed its propaganda, engaged in a frenzy of jingoism during the fighting, then turned on each other in an orgy of self-recrimination. As a troubled Dan Rather declares at the end of MacArthur’s chronicle, “Suck-up coverage is in.”
There is something to this. Many American correspondents in the gulf were covering their first war. They came across as callow children of the video arcades, stupefied by the high-tech hype at press briefings. MacArthur, too, can seem callow as he sometimes casts a conspiratorial light on rather ordinary editorial decisions. Thus NEWSWEEK’S publication of an essay by President George Bush (or his ghostwriters) becomes “the Newsweek-Bush collaboration” which “deserves special attention as one of the most shameless examples of media war promotion disguised as journalism that occurred during the Gulf crisis.”
“Second Front” also demonstrates a very vague sense of practical realities. MacArthur advocates adversarial reporting, but any journalist covering troops has to establish trust with the soldiers around him. A modicum of civility, even camaraderie, does not imply the Stockholm syndrome. Every war is different, and every medium has different needs. In guerrilla conflicts like Vietnam in the 1960s, Central America in the ’80s or the Balkans today, journalists can drive their cars to the war if they want to. Many brave ones have been killed doing just that. Most correspondents hate “pool” coverage in which only a few are allowed to witness the action, then are required to share their material with those left behind. But there is sometimes no logistical alternative.
Be that as it may, some of MacArthur’s anger is well founded. American journalists, as individuals and as a group, should have taken a stronger stand against the Pentagon’s restrictions. At times, news organizations seemed so busy courting generals they forgot to ask questions. Competing correspondents, papers and networks played right into the Pentagon’s hands.
Taking a cue from the British in the Falklands War 10 years ago, the American military has learned how to control the press by limiting its movements and supplying a great deal of its own information, carefully spun. Reporters may not see much, but they have plenty of material to file. In this way, as one U.S. Navy analyst ut it “the news media can be a useful tool or even a weapon, in prosecuting a war psychologically.” It goes without saying that this is no role for the American press.
In the gulf, the U.S. military had a lot of leverage over reporters. News organizations at first had to plead for visas to Saudi Arabia (which regards journalists with rather less sympathy than spies). Then they had to plead for access to the troops in the desert. They established a pattern of obsequiousness, and with each concession, a price was exacted. In the end, much of the best reporting was done by correspondents who broke the rules. But a remarkable number of journalists played ball only to find that they were still excluded from the battlefield, still lacking timely images of the war.
In Washington, too, the fourth estate appeared uncritical. Journalists can only cringe as MacArthur recounts the widely reported story of Iraqis throwing infants out of incubators in Kuwait hospitals. Stories of baby massacres have served propagandists for centuries. Like most, this was a complete fabrication.
The irony of such lies is that when they are discovered, they discredit the truth. The tarnished victory of Desert Storm should make this clear. But the Pentagon can’t leave well enough alone. After eight months of negotiations, it recently agreed to new guidelines for future war coverage, endorsing the principle of " independent" reporting and limiting the use of controlled pools. But it still insists that stories pass a “security review,” which is censorship with a censored name. “We eaved in again,” says MacArthur.
This is not the kind of judgment correspondents like to hear from armchair observers. But it is a worthwhile warning. They also serve who only sit and read.
