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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 178 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 178, September 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War
John R. Macarthur
University of California £9.95
Midway through the 1991 Gulf War a colleague called me late one night at the office. He had been sent out to Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia, to cover the conflict. He told me about a new term in vogue among British press corps in Saudi Arabia – ‘fiskery’.
A ‘fiskery’, he explained, is when you make up a story, doctoring or even inventing quotes to make it fit your own preconceived ideas. Robert Fisk, the Independent’s Middle Eastern correspondent, had clearly ‘gone native’.
His book about the Lebanon was supposedly a case in point: he was too soft on the Arabs and too hard on the Israelis.
At the time I dismissed these comments as part of the professional rivalry of journalists. After reading John R. Macarthur’s book, I’m not so sure. I now believe Fisk was himself the victim of state ‘fiskery’.
His colleagues were deliberately fed disinformation about one of the few journalists who tried to break through the fog of censorship over the Gulf War. Macarthur’s book provides a mass of evidence showing just how the media was repeatedly ‘fisked’ from day one of the conflict.
It examines the gyrations of major United States news gathering organisations over that period. Key to the process was the supine attitude of the media itself. Shortly after the invasion representatives of several major US TV networks began to lobby for their journalists to be allowed into neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
The Pentagon had its own agenda. In a memo on how to manage the press, the chief PR man for General Schwarzkopf, head of the US military effort, said, ‘News media representatives will be escorted at all times. Repeat, at all times.’
The escort system, known as ‘pooling’, meant that journalists were each assigned to teams. Each team was escorted by military ‘minders’, ostensibly there to help them. In practice they acted as mini-censors, preventing journalists from roaming about on their own, denying access to any sensitive material and handing out a selection of mindless statistical chaff.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the pool system became widely accepted by journalists in the Gulf. Indeed, when a few like Robert Fisk decided to break from the system, they were reviled by the others for doing so. The pool, meanwhile, reported uncritically what it was fed by the military. It was prepared to censor itself in the process.
For example, readers and viewers at home were fed stories about the incredible accuracy of the Allies’ new ‘smart’ bombs. As Macarthur says, ‘After the war, the Air Force announced that laser and radar-guided bombs and missiles made up just 7 percent of all US explosives dropped on Iraq and Kuwait.
‘The other 93 percent were conventional “dumb” bombs, dropped primarily by highflying B-52s from the Vietnam War era. Ten percent of “smart bombs” missed their targets, while 75 percent of “dumb” bombs missed their targets.’
Or the story, shown repeatedly on our TV screens of birds poisoned by oil from refineries which the dastardly Iraqis had deliberately allowed to leak into the Persian Gulf. The oil leaks were later shown to be largely caused by Allied bombing.
Equally, there were the claims in September 1990 by US president George Bush that the Iraqis had up to 50,000 troops ready to invade Saudi Arabia. This justified the sending of the massive taskforce.
In fact, satellite pictures available to the press showed clearly that the Iraqi presence in Kuwait was a third of that alleged. Only a tiny Florida paper printed the pictures. Macarthur’s book is one of a handful of accounts which knocks the pretensions about journalism as the defender of freedom. It also demolishes another myth – that of Vietnam correspondents who were opposed to the war effort there and single handedly succeeded in stopping it. In fact, they were as venal and ‘patriotic’ as later generations turned out to be in the Gulf.
The one difference lay in the contradiction between their role and how it showed back at home. They wanted the US to win the war but were angry about the way it was being waged. Meanwhile, every night television screens showed pictures of body bags and wounded soldiers being carried off transporter planes at US Air Force bases. It was the massive internal dissent, seen in the huge demonstrations against the war, that stopped the generals in their tracks.
Macarthur scores heavily when he rubbishes the media. But there is very little analysis of its overall role in society. It reflects ruling class ideas while at the same time being very occasionally forced to confront them. Despite its role it can – sometimes accidentally – have an impact. Few who saw it will forget the picture published in the Observer of the Iraqi soldier, roasted alive in his vehicle by Allied planes. Perhaps not surprisingly, that picture appeared only after the war was over. The impact was there but the potential to mobilise around it had gone.
Yet pictures like that might not have appeared at all had it not been for the determination of many British journalists and others who came together to form Media Workers Against the War. During its brief existence MWAW challenged some of the more extreme lies then being put across about the war.
Each time our rulers come back and try to ‘fisk’ us into supporting yet another military adventure, this book will play its part in reminding us of what happened before.
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