Page 235 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

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 Saddam 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 we as citizens are to ‘take seriously the
concept of informed consent in a democracy’ (1992, p. 150) do we
not have the right to expect a fuller, more complete picture of an
event of such importance as the Gulf conflict?
Those who argue that we do have such a right criticised the
Western media – and those of Britain and the US in particular – for
so meekly embracing the pool system, the sanitised information
and disinformation coming out of Dhahran and Riyadh, and the
frequent censorship of journalistic material which occurred, as in
the Falklands, for reasons of ‘taste and tone’ rather than military
security. The media, it is argued, should have applied its Fourth
Estate, watchdog role to the event with more vigour, giving citizens

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