Page 219 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

From the onset of the crisis journalistic access to the crucial areas
was restricted, with the US and its allies co-operating in the
establishment of a ‘pool’ system. As the New York Times put it, ‘the
Gulf war marked this century’s first major conflict where the policy
was to confine reporters to escorted pools that sharply curtailed when
and how they could talk to the troops’ (quoted in Macarthur, 1992,
p.7). One hundred and fifty US military ‘public affairs’ officers were
assigned to shepherd the journalists of the ‘National Media Pool’
around the desired locations, and to keep them away from sensitive
areas. The British army deployed its apparatus of public relations
officers to perform the same function.
At the front, journalists were formed into ‘Media Reporting
Teams’, closely watched over by the military PROs who
accompanied the troops during their training and, when the time
came, into battle. With the exception of a few ‘unilaterals’ (Taylor,
1992) such as Robert Fisk of the Independent, who broke away
from the pool system and attempted, with varying degrees of
success, to gain unsupervised access to stories, the vast majority
of journalists present at the scene were subject to the ‘protection’
of the military.
While the journalists were thus constrained from moving freely
around the war zone and reporting what they saw there, the allies
fed the media with a diet of information which, on the one hand,
sanitised the conflict for domestic consumption, and on the other
contributed to the ongoing psychological battle against Hussein and
the Iraqis.
In Dhahran, where the allies were preparing their military offensive,
a Joint Information Bureau was established to supply journalists with
material. When hostilities began, this amounted largely to video film
of aircraft undertaking aerial strikes against Iraqi targets. The material
appeared to demonstrate the success of the allies’ military tactics, while
avoiding coverage of Iraqi casualties. As many observers have noted,
the media war had the appearance of a computer game. Visuals were
often accompanied by exaggerated claims of success in bombing raids,
taking out Iraqi missiles, and so on.
The Gulf War was, of course, a spectacularly successful military
operation from the allies’ point of view, presenting an awesome
demonstration of the destructive power of modern technology, and
resulting in very few allied casualties. The conflict, unlike that in
Vietnam, was quick and clean, by the standards of the military, serving
to justify the restricted information policy which accompanied it. As
John Macarthur and other observers have pointed out, however, if

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