Page 219 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 198

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
above had shown the capacity of the military to exclude journalists from the
field of operations and their readiness to use this power. Media organisations
accepted the pool system in the Gulf and the restrictions which it entailed in
the knowledge that the alternative was exclusion. None of the US networks
or the major US newspapers was prepared to pay this price and see its rivals
gain access and commercial advantage. In Britain, too, organisations like the
BBC and ITN willingly co-operated with the military and its demands, on
the grounds that if they did not someone else would.
In addition to commercial considerations, media organisations were
undoubtedly influenced in their editorial policies by the nature of the conflict,
and the relatively unambiguous distinction between right and wrong which it
presented. Many have noted correctly the hypocrisy inherent in the Allies’
position: it was they who armed and supported Saddam Hussein as he
engaged in a murderous war with Iran and gassed his civilians at Halabja and
elsewhere. Despite the cries of moral outrage against Saddam’s behaviour
during the invasion and occupation of Kuwait, he was behaving more or less
as he had always done. This time, unfortunately for him, he had chosen to
challenge the strategic interests of the US and its allies by threatening Arab oil
reserves.
While many questioned the Allies’ motivations for going to war with Iraq,
once it had begun there were few in the West prepared to take Saddam’s side.
Iraq was not Vietnam or Nicaragua, a fact reflected in the media’s enthu-
siastic adoption of the Allies’ perspective on events. As Bruce Cummings
observes of media coverage: ‘the Gulf War sequence reversed Vietnam:
whereas television served [US] state policy in the first phase of the war and
questioned it in the second (after Tet), Gulf coverage interrogated the war in
the months before Desert Storm, and served the state once the storm broke’
(1992, p. 103).
There was, in short, an exceptionally high degree of consensus around the
legitimacy of Allied war aims, shared even by those who criticised the
sanitisation and voluntary censorship of coverage exhibited by the main
media. To an extent not seen since the Second World War, operation Desert
Storm was viewed as a ‘just’ war.
The Allies’ carefully controlled account of the conflict was not entirely
unchallenged, however. Earlier we noted that throughout the conflict there
were Western journalists present in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. CNN’s Peter
Arnett, in particular, provided information which, if not hostile to the allies’
cause, frequently contradicted the public relations emanating from Riyadh.
When, for example, US bombs destroyed an air-raid shelter in Baghdad,
killing hundreds of civilians and shattering the concept of a ‘clean’ war, CNN
and other Western television organisations were present to film the
aftermath, disseminating images of death and destruction to the global
audience. Saddam’s administration of course welcomed such coverage, and
tolerated the presence of Western journalists in Baghdad in the belief that

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