Page 236 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

a genuine opportunity to judge the rights and wrongs of Allied
policy, and the appropriateness of the military response to the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait. Thankfully, the argument continues, Allied
casualties were not on the scale of Vietnam, but if they had been,
or if the conflict had sucked in Israel, Syria and the other Arab
states, would we have been able to give or withhold our ‘informed
consent’?
The media’s general acceptance of the military’s close manage-
ment and control of their newsgathering was a product, first, of
straightforward commercial criteria. The experience of the early
1980s conflicts discussed 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 enthusiastic 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).

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