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BACK TO : The Gulf War of 1991
Censorship in the Gulf by David Benjamin 
Censorship in the Gulf © 1995, David Benjamin The first casualty of war is the truth. Truth is not always killed in war, more often it is missing, or being held prisoner. During the Gulf War, the Allied Coalition sought to ensure that the media reported the truth as the military saw it. This goal required heavy controls on what the media saw and how they reported it. Overt censorship was practically non-existent. Instead, the military limited access to the story and the players in it. The military won extremely positive coverage during the war at the price of a dissatisfied press corps and lingering doubts about whether what the press saw was the whole story. The same factors that produced the military victory over the Iraqis aided the military victory over the media. Empty deserts and vast distances provided both an ideal theater for mobile armored warfare, and for keeping the press at the mercy of the military. Press controls included limited access to the theater in Saudi Arabia, pooling the press to reduce the logistical demands on the military, and reporting restrictions on what could not be reported. A Brief History of Pool Reporting Pools were the primary way that the military exercised control over the media. Under a press pool, the members of the pool cover the story and then share their reports with the other members of the pool and the press outside of the pool. Pools are used to cover events that cannot handle large numbers of journalists. For instance, a pool accompanies the President of the U.S. on Air Force One flights. During the Gulf War, the question was whether a large military formation engaged in combat could handle large numbers of journalists. The history is mixed. During World War II, only a limited number of wartime correspondents were with the troops at any one time. This was partly due to the relative expense of sending a correspondent out from the States to cover the war, and partly due to a military decision to limit the logisitical burden of numerous media representatives. For example, there were 461 reporters accredited with Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, but only 27 invaded with the troops into Normandy on D-Day. (1) In Vietnam the maximum number of reporters in the field at any one time was 47, this peak occurring during the Tet offensive. This was out of a collection of 400 journalists. The low numbers of journalists in the field is surprising because the nature of the Vietnam War made for fairly easy coverage. Army and Marine operations were strategically defensive and involved little movement. Reporters could literally drive themselves to key headquarters and could get to battle sites if they so chose with little interference from above. The downside became the increased negative coverage of the war as the war turned sour.(2) The Grenada operation represented the low point for media-military relations. No reporters were allowed onto the island with the U.S. troops until several days after the operation had begun. The reaction to this policy by the media was quick and vehement. Keeping the media away from a major military operation was unprecedented. In response to this reaction, the military began to consider a national emergency pool of reporters who could be activated quickly for secret or fast-breaking military operations.(3) The first test of the pool system was in Panama in 1989. The pool reporters arrived in Panama before the operation, but were then cooped up on a military base to protect them from danger. They were also treated to a dissertation on the Panama Canal which did not help their mood. The military released them after 24 hours and after most of the fighting had died down. The journalistic post-mortems from this exercise were again extremely uncomplimentary. The Defense Department again issued bulletins promising to do better.(4) During the Gulf War, 1600 journalists and media support crew were in Saudi Arabia. 400 were assigned to the units doing the fighting during the ground war.(5) This was unprecedented coverage for a war zone. The presence of foreign journalists was also a precedent for the Saudis who had not had any foreign journalists in the country prior to the Kuwait invasion. For the 1200 journalists who were not at the fighting, however, the press pools were an unneeded restriction, hampering the coverage of the war. As a result of their complaints, combined with those from the pool who were dissatisfied, the Defense Department is currently reviewing the pool process again. Formal Censorship Procedures The Allied Coalition imposed several conditions on reporters operating in Saudi Arabia. Failure to follow these guidelines would have resulted in expulsion from Saudi Arabia.(6) No mention could be made of the specific numbers of troops, planes, supplies, etc. Only general terms could be used to describe the forces available. No mention could be made of future plans. (Several reporters were briefed on plans of U.S. forces before the ground war. No stories were printed about those briefings.)(7) Reporters could not mention the specific locations of units. The rules of engagements, the rules specifying under what conditions Coalition forces would use force, were off limits. Intelligence gathering operations and collection activities could not be mentioned. While an operation was in progress, specific information on friendly troop movements. The points of origin for aircraft flying missions could not be mentioned. Information on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of enemy military measures. Identifying information on missing or downed aircraft or ships while search and rescue operations are underway. Special operations forces' methods, unique equipment, or tactics. Operating methods and tactics in general. Operational and support vulnerabilities until the information is released by Central Command.(8) The most controversial requirement was the obligation to stay with a public affairs escort on Saudi bases and at the discretion of the commander on U.S. bases. This severely restricted access by reporters to the combat area and to troops. The escorts quality varied greatly. Some escorts became known for getting reporters lost in transit between bases. Others took upon themselves the authority to censor reporters' interviews. In one case, the escort quibbled over whether returning pilots could be characterized as "giddy", the reporter's phrase, or "proud", the escort's.(9) One escort would attempt to intimidate soldiers being interviewed by holding out a turned-on tape recorder behind the reporter.(10) All pool reports had to be submitted to the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran, the official censoring location, for security review. Any material censored at this level could be appealed to Washington. During the course of the Gulf War, five appeals were made by news organizations, four were overturned and the other remained censored after the Defense Department appealed to the editor.(11) Censorship Through Limited Access The first difficulty for the press in covering the war was actually getting to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia did not have any American reporters in the country when the invasion of Kuwait occurred. The Saudis were not eager to change the situation. The U.S. had to use persuasion to get the press in to cover the military. Press coverage in the Gulf was divided into several different pools, each of which assigned specialists from the four media specialties: print, photography, radio, and television. Pool reports would be brought back from the report site to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and from there distributed to the other media participants in the pool. Only a limited number of slots were available, and this promoted dissension in the ranks of the press. Journalists from each of the specialty branches handled assignments to the pools, while the Defense Department assigned the areas to be covered by the pools. The limited numbers of slots allowed only one journalist from the major media to be assigned to pools. Those not assigned were reduced to receiving the daily press briefing in Dhahran, or striking out on their own to find the news in the desert. The latter were known as "unilaterals". The pool approach was designed to limit access to the troops by unilaterals by giving the pool reporters a vested interest in keeping unilaterals out.(12) The pools also served to limit the access by non-American reporters. Central Command gave one pool slot to the Saudis, and one for the entire international contingent of the press. The result was international coverage that depended heavily on U.S. sources for video. Even Jordan's news coverage was primarily U.S.-based. However, enterprising journalists from Sweden and other countries did manage to cover the war in Saudi Arabia from the U.S. side without using the pool system.(13) Initially, the pools were intended to operate only until the logistical support had been developed in the theater of operations to allow unilateral coverage. In practice, the DoD kept the pool system in operation until after the cease-fire had been signed. The DoD intended the pool system to simplify its job of allowing press access without being buried under the avalanche of press that were in the theater. Censorship by Delay One of the biggest complaints by the press corps during Desert Storm was the delays in getting pool reports back from the front. This most affected pools covering the army units involved in the flanking movement. If everything worked right, the quickest a piece of video could make it back from the front was one day. Frequently it took three. Two different causes produced the delay. The first was the sheer distance involved in the war. Getting a pool report to Dhahran from the VII Corps required travel over immense areas of desert to King Khalid Military City (KKMC) where the story would be placed on a cargo plane for shipment to Dhahran. Most of the traffic during the ground war was going in the opposite direction.(14) The second cause, related to the first, was the low priority the army gave to the news. The original plan was for the trip back to KKMC to be made by jeep. Only after vehement protest by the pool reporters were the plans changed to use helicopters, and as luck would have it, the following day a sand storm struck grounding practically everything.(15) The neglect in planning for pool logistics was symptomatic of the animosity that the army had for the pool reporters and the media in general. Many of the mid-level officers in the army blamed the media for the loss in Vietnam. This animosity carried down to relations between the media and officers who were not in the army during Vietnam as an institutional memory. Despite evidence that showed that the media followed rather than led the public's change of attitude against the war, the officers in the army were the least helpful of all the services in the Gulf War. Officers viewed the position of Public Affairs Officer, the official liaison position between the military and the media, as a dead end job. Officers who served the Army in that capacity were the least motivated to help the journalists.(16) In contrast, the Marines were much more media aware. Public Affairs positions were assigned on the basis of who wanted the job. The result was better coordination between pools and the troops. Helped by their shorter supply lines, the Marines managed to get pool reports back within one day. The Marines were also much more willing to take additional reporters, practically begging the Central Command for more.(17) The results showed the Marines media savvy. The Marines represented a small fraction of the total number of ground forces: two brigades of Marines versus seven Army divisions. Yet the Marines garnered half of the reports of the ground war. The only reports of infantry in action printed during the ground war came from the Marines' pools.(18) The Effect of the Media One of the central reasons why the media enjoys protection by the First Amendment is that the media serves the public by bringing it the information necessary for public discussion. One of the paradoxes of the Gulf War was the division between the media and the public's views of the media's job. The public viewed the media's job as being done well. The public also believed that the military could have used more censorship than they did.(19) The media believed that they had been shackled by the military--unable to tell the story the way it should have been told. The various media organizations viewed themselves as being used by the government as agents of propaganda and misinformation. This view started with the disproved Kuwaiti incubator story before the war(20) and intensified by media belief that they had been deliberately misled about the threatened Marine amphibious invasion from the Gulf. The media's impact on the course of the fighting was minor. Even though reporters were on the scene to witness the First Infantry's controversial trench clearing by bulldozer tactics, the stories did not have the impact that the reporters wished. In part this is because of the delays imposed by the Army in getting the story back, and in part because the story was not as sensational as the reporter thought it to be.(21) The media did act as a zone of truth. Where the media were, the facts of this or that alleged war crime could be established. What was left to decide were the interpretations of the facts. For instance, after the attack on the infant formula plant in Iraq, reporters were on hand to demonstrate that the factory was indeed an infant formula factory. The only argument thereafter was whether the factory's products could be used in the manufacture of biological warfare agents with little change. Where the media were excluded, allegations of war crimes could escalate out of hand. The charges of incubator stealing from Kuwaiti hospitals by the Iraqis would have been easy to squelch had the Iraqi government invited reporters to view conditions in Kuwait. Conclusion The media impact on the Gulf War was minimal. Instead, the media was kept away from the center of activity by deliberate and accidental acts by a military still smarting from its loss in Vietnam. In a sense, the media preferred to fight the last war, Vietnam. The media would have liked to be able to find the information that could change the public's perception of a war. The military preferred to be left alone to do their job. The result was a conflict that the military won. And that is for the best. Information is not free in wartime. Publishing or broadcasting information at the wrong time can get people killed. Restraints are necessary. In the Gulf, the military applied the restraints it needed to win. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bibliography Clark, Ramsey. The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1994. Denton, Robert E., Jr., ed. The Media and the Persian Gulf War. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1993. Fialka, John J. Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1992. MacArthur, John R. Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. Massing, Michael. "Another Front." Chap. in The Media and the Gulf War. ed. Hedrick Smith. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1992. Nohrstedt, Stig A. "Ruling by Pooling." Chapter in Triumph of the Image: The Media's War in the Persian Gulf--a Global Perspective. Mowlana, Hamid, George Gerbner, and Herbert I. Schiller, eds. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992 Norris Margot. "Only the Guns Have Eyes." Chapter in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinowitz, eds. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutger's University Press, 1994. Schanberg, Sydney H. "Censoring for Political Security." Chap. in The Media and the Gulf War. ed. Hedrick Smith. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1992. Trainor, Lt. Gen. Bernard E., USMC. "The Military and the Media: A Troubled Embrace." Chap. in The Media and the Gulf War. ed. Hedrick Smith. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1992. Williams, Pete. "Ground Rules and Guidelines for Desert Shield." Chap. in The Media and the Gulf War. ed. Hedrick Smith. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1992. Williams, Pete. "Statement before the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs." Chap. in The Media and the Gulf War. ed. Hedrick Smith. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1992. Woodward, Gary C. "The Rules of the Game: The Military and the Press in the Persian Gulf War." Chap. in The Media and the Persian Gulf War. ed. Robert E. Denton, Jr. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1993. |