Truth as the First Casualty: Mainstream Media Portrayal
of the Gulf War
***** WINTER *************** EJC/REC Vol. 2, No. 1, 1991 ***
TRUTH AS THE FIRST CASUALTY:
MAINSTREAM MEDIA PORTRAYAL OF THE GULF WAR
James Winter
University of Windsor
Abstract. Mainstream news media coverage of
the Persian Gulf War is examined in a case study
comparison of the conflicting perspectives of
political economy and (U.S.) cultural studies as
typified by John Fiske.
The media presented a united front on the U.S.
political, economic, and military goals in the
war. As such, they formed an indispensable part
of the State apparatus, omitting perspectives
which are fundamental to a counter-hegemonic
perspective.
Journalists and the news media generally
accomplished the foregoing in two ways. First,
they mainly relayed the perspective of the U.S.
administration, including its military and
academic collaborators, in an isolated and
uncritical fashion. This was done to the
exclusion of the alternative perspectives
elaborated herein. Second, they adopted this
dominant perspective as their own view, and passed
that along to viewers with resultant heightened
credibility.
This paper places the Persian Gulf crisis and
war within a broader political, economic and
historical framework. It adopts a critical
perspective on the mainstream media framing which
limited reality to the "common sense" range of the
dominant ideology.
To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never
have so many been manipulated so much, by so few.
(Aldous Huxley, 1958)[1]
It was early March, 1991, and at the Michigan State
fairgrounds, a 23-year veteran Detroit TV reporter was
signing autographs for several fans who assigned him star
status. The occasion was a welcome home ceremony for
Captain Steven Tait, USAF, a Michigan resident and the first
pilot to shoot down an Iraqi fighter jet in the Gulf War.
Addressing the crowd, Tait said:
On the war effort itself, I think we contributed
two things. The top military leaders did an
outstanding job. The other thing that was
successful was the technology that we had and it's
the taxpayers out there that buy the technology
that we need to do that! (Applause)[2]
A Vietnam veteran interviewed by the reporter was
somewhat disgruntled. Partially echoing U.S. President
George Bush, he said that in Vietnam, "We had our hands tied
behind our backs because of the politicians." (This was
only a partial echo, because Bush also tended to blame the
media and the public for the U.S. "failure" in Vietnam.)
The next day, Sunday, the assignment editor told a
student observer that there was "not much going on today.
We need to formulate stories, but not make them up. If you
have any ideas, let me know." She sent the same veteran
reporter to yet another "Welcome Home Troops" rally (this
time in Taylor, Michigan), where he interviewed a soldier in
uniform about the reaction the troops were getting at home.
Afterwards, the reporter learned that the young man never
went to the Gulf, but was ready to leave "on a moment's
notice." For the on-air TV news story, the message, "Almost
served in the Gulf" was superimposed over the video footage
of the soldier's interview.
Maybe Andy Warhol was right after all: everyone gets to
be famous for 15 minutes.
The reporter too, mimicked Bush, when in his "stand-up"
at the end of the news clip he said: "Many here agree with
President Bush when he says the Vietnam syndrome is over."
The media generally also appeared to subscribe to
Bush's interpretation of the Vietnam syndrome, and did their
best to overcome it too.
Theoretical Framework
The primary focus of this paper is on the degree to
which the information presented in mainstream media
reflected the explanations and interpretations offered by
the U.S. military and administration regarding the events in
the Persian Gulf in 1990-91. I will examine these events
and the media's role in light of two competing theories,
which I have chosen to call the "normative consensus"
theory, versus the notions of journalistic empowerment and
consequent theory of "media pluralism."
The normative consensus view holds that along with
other major cultural institutions, the media serve to
"construct an order that is consonant with the needs and
interests of dominant groups" and which "has the ideological
effect of reproducing hegemony."[3] This latter concept is
attributed to the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, who
explicated it in the following fashion:
Corporate interests, in their present and future
development, transcend the corporate limits of the
merely economic group, and can and must become the
interests of other subordinate groups. This is
the most purely political phase, and marks the
decisive passage from the structure to the sphere
of the complex superstructures; it is the phase in
which previously germinated ideologies become
"party," come into confrontation and conflict,
until only one of them, or at least a single
combination of them, tends to prevail, to gain the
upper hand, to propagate itself over the whole
social area - bringing about not only a unison of
economic and political aims, but also intellectual
and moral unity, posing all the questions around
which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on
a "universal" plane, and thus creating the
hegemony of a fundamental social group over a
series of subordinate groups.[4]
With regard to the role of the media specifically,
Armand Mattelart has summed this up as, "...when the media
actually begin to function as an integral part of the State
apparatus,"[5] a notion which is closely linked to Gramsci's
description of the media as a "hegemonic apparatus." In the
recent communication literature, this position is
represented by those who may be combined for purposes of
convenience and brevity under the label of political
economists.[6]
In contrast, the pluralistic view of journalistic (and
audience) empowerment hold that there is a competing elite
structure which leads to "ideological conflict" in the
media.[7] As Ericson, et al. conclude:
Contrary to the dominant normative view in the
academic literature that journalism is
characterized by consensus among its
practitioners, we found persistent and pervasive
differences, divisions, and conflict. Editors
struggled to control... Reporters asserted their
autonomy... This activity ensured that there was
real equivocality, and openings for discovery and
alternatives, in their work.[8]
The pluralist stance was exemplified by the late
Canadian sociologist John Porter, in his classic text, The
Vertical Mosaic (1965). Porter's examination of census data
contradicted the "Horatio Alger" myth of the self-made man,
and as such undermined notions of individual determinism.
However, similar to Ericson, et al., and others in the
current literature, although he recognized the role of the
media in the "ideological system," i.e., maintenance of the
social structure, Porter saw that system as associated with
but distinct from other power systems. He argued that the
media and other components of that system provide the
justification for separate political, social and economic
systems. In short, he envisioned a pluralist, competing
elite structure.[9]
Porter's student Wallace Clement, in The Canadian
Corporate Elite (1975) and works since then, differs.
Clement drew on C. Wright Mills and Ralph Miliband to argue
that the media in general and the press in particular do not
constitute a free, open, or diverse marketplace, any more
than does the marketplace generally. Instead, the free
marketplace of ideas is an unattained ideal, the myth of
which serves to legitimate existing monopoly power and class
privilege.[10]
Clement argued that rather than having a pluralistic
society of competing elites, we have a monolithic elite
system. He provided evidence of considerable overlap
between the media and economic elites, concluding that "in
large part, they are the same people,"[11] thus buttressing
his position that the monopoly of a few dominant sources has
put an end to diversity and the so- called "open market"
situation.[12]
Thus, Clement argued that if the function of the media
is to relay or translate information for the public, they
must be autonomous from other elites if they are to do this
in a detached and objective manner. They must be part of
the pluralist system described by Porter. His research,
however, indicated that they are not.
One outcropping of the pluralist view held by Porter
and others is the "cultural studies" rubric, perhaps
typified by Stuart Hall in the British school, and John
Fiske in the U.S. In Fiske's view, mainstream media
constitute "polysemic texts that can be read in different
ways."
"Dallas" is a remarkably "open" program: Rick
Altman's description of it as a "menu" from which
various, differently socially situated viewers
choose different "meals" is a productive one. It
is certainly much more productive than seeing the
text as a singular determinate, closing down its
meanings and producing a singular dominant
ideology.[13]
For the most part the research by Fiske and others
focuses on the process of self-emancipation realized by
audiences, through "strategies of resistance," a view which
ultimately proclaims "the people" as "the driving force
behind the cultural industries."[14] At base, however, it
can be seen as fundamentally in agreement with the argument
of Ericson, et al. that the media (by implication, both in
news and in entertainment) are open and diverse, and
ultimately with the liberal-pluralist view that all is
basically right with the media, and consequently with
democracy.
In light of the above, my purpose is twofold. First, I
will demonstrate how the mainstream media presented
Gramsci's "unison of political and economic aims" on the
Persian Gulf War. Second, I will delineate the (hidden)
corporate or "State apparatus" interests which were not
examined by the media, and which are fundamental to a
counter-hegemonic perspective. As part of this latter
process, and in order to contextualize adequately these
events within the broader framework of political economy, it
is necessary to elaborate the untold story which was omitted
from the mainstream news media,
The Ubiquitous War Hero
By the beginning of March, George Bush had declared
victory. He also had closed the books on another chapter of
historical engineering. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam
syndrome once and for all," Bush gushed in what The New York
Times described as "a spontanteous [sic] burst of pride"
following the war.[15]
This was in keeping with his press conference held to
announce the war, only hours after the massive bombing of
Iraqi forces began on January 16. "This will not be another
Vietnam," Bush said, evidently promising to deliver public
support for the war. "Our troops will have the best
possible support in the entire world. They will not be
asked to fight with one hand tied behind their backs."
The U.S. dropped 4,600,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam,
and 400,000 tons of napalm. They sent 2,150,000 troops to
Vietnam, of whom 57,900 died while killing 1,921,000
Vietnamese.[16] So, in what way was the U.S. fighting with
"one hand tied behind their backs?" It certainly wasn't for
a lack of military firepower. Noam Chomsky has suggested
that this refers to the Soviet Union as a superpower
deterrent to unlimited U.S. aggression, a deterrent which
internal problems in the USSR have since removed.[17] As
mentioned above, another possibility is the lack of public
support for a sustained war abroad.
Bush addressed the troops at his first "welcome home"
ceremony, in Sumter South Carolina, on St. Patrick's day.
"When you left it was still fashionable to question
America's decency, America's courage, America's resolve," he
said. "No one, no one in the whole world doubts us any
more. [Applause] What you did, you helped us revive the
America of our old hopes and dreams."
Bush told the public and troops' families,
You don't have to wear a uniform to be a war hero.
Here, crowded on the bleachers, and out there on
the field, are heroes and heroines of all ages.
Mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, children,
neighbors, friends... the loved ones and even
strangers all across our great country hung out
yellow ribbons, unfurled flags, sent letters and
gifts... no one understands this magic but it's a
kind of blessing that enables good people to
accomplish great deeds.[18]
Thus did Bush establish that those at home waving the flag
were heroes too, and in so doing, he included the public as
part of the war effort, leaving no room for protest and
effectively defining non-support for the war out of
existence.
In designating the supportive observers as war heroes,
Bush reinforced the key concept of individual
determinism.[19] Even as they waved their tiny American
flags and rose (en masse) to deliver standing ovations, the
spectators were congratulated on their individual roles. As
Mattelart comments, in order to reinforce the "programming"
under hegemony,
Each message should reproduce the receiver's
status as an isolated individual. The forms of
transmitting reality, the very concept of
information in capitalist society, must reproduce
this principle which inspires the morals of
society, and which makes the individual believe
that his well-being depends only on himself.[20]
Parenthetically, various strands of U.S. cultural
studies do appear to reproduce this principle. As Garnham
put it, this work has "moved ever further, not only from
political economy but from notions of social determination
in general, to focus on discourse within a relativist,
largely ahistorical and individualistic frame of
analysis."[21] Or, as Sholle observed, the audience-centered
focus of U.S. cultural studies is "dangerously close to
being incorporated into... conservative political approaches
and administrative research."[22]
If audience responses such as ribbons, flags and
letters are due to individual and inexplicable "magic," then
this indeed is a "blessing" for Bush's "good people." It
may also be self-evident that if we ourselves are
responsible for everything ranging from our social status to
the war on Saddam Hussein, then there is no point in looking
for broader causal factors.
Vietnam: A Case of Collective Historical Amnesia
The "Vietnam syndrome" was an underlying theme of the
Gulf War. In referring to it, again, Bush appeared to
signal an (unjustified) lack of public support for the war
effort.[23] Others viewed it as the public's desire for
peace.[24] Neither is accurate, although the latter comes
much closer than the former. An understanding of
conflicting interpretations of what happened in Vietnam is
crucial in order to place the Gulf War in perspective.
Hence, we will examine the Vietnam syndrome in some detail
at the outset.
In documenting their media propaganda model, Herman and
Chomsky illustrate that the Vietnam war, certainly as seen
by the official government and mainstream media, and perhaps
in the public's recollection as well, bears more resemblance
to a "Rambo" film than to actual events.[25]
This conventional "common sense"[26] history of Vietnam
is roughly as follows: In the 1950s, as the French abandoned
their fight against the communist hordes in Vietnam, the
U.S. and several allies became involved. This escalated
gradually until the U.S. was provoked by the Vietcong, in
the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, into sharply accelerated
efforts. U.S. involvement was at the urging of the South
Vietnam government and people, who opposed the Vietcong and
communism. After about four years of heavy involvement, and
following the communist Tet offensive of 1968, U.S. media
coverage turned against the war. Television in particular,
with its vivid footage of My Lai-type massacres and U.S.
bodybags, also served to turn public opinion against the
war. With the media and the public against them, the
administration and Pentagon had little recourse but to seek
"peace with honor."
According to this perspective, the Vietnam syndrome
represents the inability of armed forces to win a protracted
war which is unpopular with the media and the public back
home. Even though the goal of the U.S. administration might
be the altruistic defense of small third world countries
faced with naked communist aggression, this means nought
when filtered by the leftist media and opposed by their
peacenik collaborators.
A competing interpretation, or what Ralph Nader termed
a "dissenting ideology" as applied to Vietnam, might be as
follows: By the late 1940s, U.S. backing of France's
post-WW2 attempts to reconquer its Indochina colonies meant
that the U.S. was aligned against Vietnamese nationalist
forces struggling for freedom and representing the
overwhelming majority of the population. With French
withdrawal in 1954, the U.S. subverted Geneva agreements
which laid the groundwork for the unification of Vietnam,
instead establishing a client state in South Vietnam which
controlled its population with substantial violence. In the
early 1960s, the U.S. bombed South Vietnam in an effort to
drive millions of people into "strategic hamlets" which were
no more than barbed- wire concentration camps, and which
would ostensibly protect the South Vietnamese from communist
guerrillas whom they were willingly supporting.[27]
Contrary to the arguments of proponents of the Vietnam
syndrome, the evidence suggests that it was the U.S.
government, not the media or the public, which first
abandoned hopes of a military victory after the 1968 Tet
offensive.
The Tet offensive of January 1968 ... convinced
U.S. elites that the war was proving too costly to
the United States, and that strategy should shift
toward a more "capital- intensive" operation with
reliance on an indigenous mercenary army (in the
technical sense of the phrase) and gradual
withdrawal of the U.S. forces, which were by then
suffering a severe loss of morale, a matter of
growing concern to military authorities.[28]
Thus, the media and eventually the public merely "mirrored
the changes in elite opinion."[29] Content analyses of the
period indicate that the media were pro-war. Polls taken
indicate that watching TV coverage made the American public
more rather than less supportive of the war effort up until
1969, when the focus of media coverage shifted to the Paris
peace talks.[30] So, rather than media portrayals turning
public opinion against the war, eventually resulting in low
troop morale and political pressures which caused the U.S.
to lose the war, it appears that the media and the public
merely followed the decisions, attitudes, and lead of the
administration, Pentagon, elites generally (in the form of
Johnson's "wise men,") and even the demoralized troops
themselves.
Chomsky quotes from a New York Times analysis of the
debate over the Vietnam War, written much later, which
stated:
There are those Americans who believe that the war
to preserve a non-Communist, independent South
Vietnam could have been waged differently. There
are other Americans who believe that a viable,
non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth. A
decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve
this ongoing quarrel.[31]
So, the hawks allege that the U.S. could have won,
while the doves say victory was always beyond their grasp.
What's missing, says Chomsky, is a third position, based on
the view that "the United States simply had no legal or
moral right to intervene in the internal affairs of Vietnam
in the first place." The third position exceeds what
Chomsky calls, "The Bounds of the Expressible," and
illustrates the genius of "brainwashing under freedom."
If one rejects the common sense view in favor of the
dissenting view, then the question of why the administration
(successfully) has foisted the former view on us becomes
paramount. A logical conclusion seems to be a variation of
"blaming the victims,"[32] if it is possible to conceive of
American media and public as victims of the Vietnam war,
without in any way wishing to downplay the infinitely more
important case of the Vietnamese victims themselves.
The media have of course been, perhaps willingly,
victimized by the flak machine which constitutes the fourth
filter in Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model. This is
all the more evident, as these authors point out, in that
the two-volume tome constituting the authoritative "proof"
that the media lost the war through their biased,
anti-government reporting, was sponsored by Freedom
House,[33] one of the preeminent organizations which "harass
the media and put pressure on them to follow the corporate
agenda and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy."[34] The
effectiveness of this approach may be seen in the way the
media toed the official line in reporting on Nicaragua,
Panama, Grenada, and as we will see, the Gulf War.
Mattelart, in referring to Bruno Bettelheim's
psychoanalytic study of fairy tales (The Uses of
Enchantment, 1976) says this
allows us to see how a culture conveyed by the
media attempts to deprive the people of its
memory. While giving the illusion of relying on
and assuming a patrimony of myths, this culture
actually standardizes, serializes and appropriates
history, which it mutilates and reduces to a
series of miscellaneous news items (faits divers).
The greatest standardization is undoubtedly that
of historical time.
Mattelart says the elite class "claims to be universal.
[I]n order to have its own history appear as 'natural,' and
the only possible interpretation, it must colonize the
history of the other classes. This is the only way it can
assure its ideological hegemony. . . The 'de-historizing'
and reduction of history into a series of faits divers
presides over all of the standards ruling the transmission
of reality."[35] Clearly, this was in operation vis-a-vis
the "Vietnam Syndrome," and was used effectively by the U.S.
administration -- and obediently relayed by the media --
during the Gulf War.
As for the public, the protestations of support for the
troops at peace rallies, combined with the ubiquitous flag
waving and yellow ribbons, attest to public guilt and
remorse over the "doctrinal consensus" on Vietnam. Three
further, brief examples are illustrative of the patriotic
frenzy aroused no doubt in part by this remorse.
1. In Seton Hall, New Jersey, college basketball
player Marco Lokar was hounded back to his
native Italy, for refusing to wear the U.S.
flag on his uniform.[36]
2. At a rally held at the SUNY college campus in
New Paltz N.Y., to protest the war, professor
Barbara Scott urged American military personnel
not to kill innocent people. In the enormous
brouhaha following the event, the media dubbed
her "Baghdad Barbara," in reference to Tokyo
Rose of WW2. Republican Senator Charles Cook
went so far as to publicly accuse Scott of
treason. Letter campaigns were aimed at the
college president and Governor Mario Cuomo,
urging them to fire Scott. Meanwhile, hate
mail arrived at her office.[37]
3. In Kutztown, Pennsylvania, a newspaper editor
was fired for his editorial titled, "How about
a little peace!"[38]
These examples illustrate that it doesn't pay to be
"unpatriotic," even if you're not American, or to promote
peace or oppose the war, in light of the Vietnam syndrome.
Indeed, coverage of peace demonstrations was
negligible. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader commented that
the peace march held in Washington D.C. on January 26, 1991:
was probably the biggest citizen demonstration
ever [held] in Washington in Winter. CBS gives
them a four-second -- that may be an exaggeration
-- scan while someone is saying, "Meanwhile, there
were protests on both coasts today." They didn't
interview anybody. The media have gone to the
point where they don't even cover the bizarre, if
the bizarre reflects a dissenting ideology.[39]
An estimated 250,000 people took part in this demonstration.
As of February 1, 1991, there were more than 3200 events
against the war held in the U.S. alone.[40] Moreover,
Hodding Carter III, former State department spokesperson for
the Carter administration, noted that the Bush White House
was "grousing about coverage of the antiwar demonstrations
-- which, I would note, was almost nonexistent."[41]
Thus, there was significant opposition to the war,
despite the overwhelmingly positive propaganda in favor of
it in the mainstream media, where public opinion was
portrayed as being universally in favor of the war and the
Bush administration. There is of course no question that
the vast majority approved of Bush's decision to use force
against Iraq; the point is that the opposition that did
exist was under-represented to the point of invisibility.
However, the "Vietnam syndrome" mindset was evident
even at anti-war demonstrations and teach-ins, where the
majority of speakers went out of their way to explain that
they too "support our troops." This demonstrates that even
the so-called "peaceniks" subscribe to, or have been
influenced by, the Bush administration's version of Vietnam.
As Z Magazine publisher Michael Albert noted:
Of course we want them back alive. But they are
Bush's troops insofar as they are soldiers
fighting an unjust war. We cannot support that. .
. . Of course I want to help save the ground
soldiers from having to kill or be killed. But I
oppose what the ground soldiers are doing.[42]
Noam Chomsky commented in May that:
Huge media campaigns wielding vacuous slogans to
dispel the danger of thought are now a staple of
the ideological system. To derail concern over
whether you should support their policy, the PR
system focuses attention on whether you support
our troops -- meaningless words, as empty as the
question of whether you support the people of
Iowa. That, of course, is just the point: to
reduce the population to gibbering idiots,
mouthing empty phrases and patriotic slogans,
waving ribbons, watching gladiatorial contests and
the models designed for them by the PR industry,
but, crucially, not thinking or acting.[43]
It may be argued that the net result was "an almost
fascist popular culture,"[44] in support of the war effort.
Mainstream media in Canada and the U.S. played an
instrumental role in delivering public support for the war
to Bush and Brian Mulroney, while simultaneously
misdirecting attention from domestic problems which in
Canada included Native issues, the Goods and Services Tax,
the Free Trade Agreement, etc.[45]
It wasn't only the Americans, with their ubiquitous
yellow ribbons, who were duped. Although survey results
consistently show that only about 20 per cent of Canadians
say war is justified when other means fail, support for the
war (option) climbed to 55 per cent after it actually
began.[46]
Both voluntary and involuntary censorship supporting
the war were underway long before it began. Media hype
climaxed in an "inevitable" momentum on January 15. Minutes
before Bush's deadline to Iraq passed, an American TV news
anchor said that if an attack didn't follow soon, "there may
be a certain sense of letdown."[47]
This gleeful anticipation typifies the mainstream media
role, which generally may be described as "cheerleading,"
and which served to "anesthetize" the public. There were a
number of other characteristics: Naming, or characterizing
war as peace; Dehumanizing the Iraqis; Demonizing Saddam
Hussein; Playing up the terrorist threat; Overestimating the
Iraqi war machine; and claiming war was the Final Resort
after failed diplomacy. Finally, the media severely
restricted the range of debate, by propagating the official
U.S. Administration's version of the issue. There were
relatively minor exceptions, as is evident from some of my
mainstream media sources. But the overwhelming emphasis,
reflected in public support for the war effort, was on the
fairytale spun by what Eisenhower dubbed the "military-
industrial complex." North Americans were subjected to a
glut of "infotainment" which totally obscured the real
picture, replacing it with the "common sense" version
approved by the Bush administration and its military arm.
Below, we will outline each of these elements of news
media portrayals, prior to contextualizing them within a
broader theoretical framework. It should be noted at the
outset, however, that the problem was by no means restricted
to news coverage. Star-studded welcome home troop
extravaganzas, Whitney Houston's video rendition of the U.S.
national anthem, the Super Bowl halftime show with George
and Barbara Bush, and talk show host Arsenio Hall, who
initially opposed the war but eventually appeared draped in
the U.S. flag, all form an important part of the popular
media perspective on the war, which is not addressed here.
This too is in keeping with the hegemonic structure of
"monopoly culture" outlined by Mattelart.
We should note in passing that the mass cultures
reinforce the mass culture, or rather that the
media mutually reinforce each other in order to
repeat ad infinitum the circle of their
repetition.[48]
What's in a Name?
To begin with, it was often not even called a "war."
And, as with Korea and Vietnam, war was never declared. In
Vietnam, it was called a "conflict." But the Newspeak
dictionary has taken a giant leap forward since then. War
has become more sanitized, and surgically clean: an
"operation." Toronto Globe and Mail editor-in-chief William
Thorsell gloated that the Gulf War "was really more of a
campaign than a war. It consisted of the largest and best
targeted bombing campaign in the history of armed conflict.
The Iraqi side cowered, evaded, endured and finally broke
under relentless pounding from the air."[49]
The 1989 invasion and war waged on Panama in search of
general Manuel Noriega was labeled "Operation Just Cause."
The War in the Gulf began with operation "Desert Shield,"
and moved to operation "Desert Storm." Indeed, in May we
were still reading newspaper stories under the logo, "After
The Storm." Of course, storms are both naturally occurring
and beyond human control. Today, "wars" are only waged on
poverty and drugs, not people. With the language of
Orwell's Newspeak, the raining of massive death and
destruction has taken on the surrealistic atmosphere of a
combination video-game and sports extravaganza.
As Mattelart notes, in the mass culture typified by
North America, "The function of [Gramsci's] civil society is
to render opaque the reality of the repressive, brutal force
of the class- State by sublimating and disguising it as
symbolic violence."[50] This contrasts with the more open
methods adopted in the U.S. client states in Central and
South America, for example, but which, as Chomsky has
documented, are "rendered opaque" for the American home
audience.
In the St. Patrick's Day address in Sumter, S.C.
referred to above, Bush summed up the war by saying "The
coalition victory in Kuwait" involved the merging of "nine
allied nations" into "a seamless theatre airforce," which
conducted "the most intense, most successful air assault in
history."[51] "That powerful, precise air assault crushed
Saddam's war machine while sparing innocent Iraqi citizens
and while saving allied lives," Bush said. But the media
not only reported Bush's words, and those of Schwartzkopf
and others, they also carried video footage or ran special
sections with full-color diagrams, witnessing their own
fascination with war technology. In so doing, they served
to disguise brutal force as symbolic violence.
About six months after the war ended, news of American
atrocities continued to leak out and to be reported with
alacrity. The Toronto Globe and Mail, for example, ran a
story (relegated to page 12) about Iraqi troops buried alive
by bulldozer tank blades. Although the story quoted
Lieutenant- Colonel Stephen Hawkins as saying the burial
tactic "was designed in part to terrorize the Iraqis into
surrendering," this was buried in the last two paragraphs of
the story. In contrast, a "Kicker" headline quoted a
Washington spokesman who said "There's no nice way to kill
somebody in a war."[52] Just as war became a game, so too
have games become war. For example, as hockey's Pittsburg
Penguins reached their first Stanley Cup final, en route to
becoming NHL champions, the media labeled this, "Operation
Ice Storm."
Operation Ice Storm has entered the ultimate
theatre of NHL operations. Operation Desert
Storm, the successful military campaign in the
Middle East earlier this year, was the instigation
for some Penguins fans to hang an Operation Ice
Storm sign in the Civic Arena on Saturday when
their conquering heroes defeated the Boston Bruins
5-3 to win the Wales Conference championship.[53]
During the war, the folks back home heard about
"sorties" or "visits" carried out using smart "ordinances"
virtually guaranteed to avoid "collateral" damage.
"Surgical strikes" called up images of diseased tissue being
removed. But those "surgical strikes" first were introduced
in Vietnam, where hundreds of thousands of Indochinese
villagers perished. In the Gulf War, about 2000 bombing
raids were conducted daily on Iraq. In the first week of
the air war, the U.S. dropped twice the tonnage of bombs
dropped on Germany during 1944. But while media and public
remained riveted to technical displays of the laser- guided
wizardry of the Cruise and Patriot missiles, U.S. officials
later admitted that at best only 60% of the laser- guided
bombs hit their target, so at least 2 out of 5 missed,
"sometimes by thousands of feet."[54] U.S. General Merrill
McPeak, Air force Chief of Staff, told reporters that the
guided bombs "hit their targets more than 90 per cent of the
time." Even so, "only about one-quarter of the conventional
bombs... hit their targets. And the vast majority of the
bombs used in the war -- almost 93 per cent -- were these
conventional 'iron' bombs."[55]
When one of the intended targets turned out to be a
bomb shelter, hundreds of civilians were killed by the
"smart" weaponry. U.S. military spokesmen responded that it
was Saddam Hussein's fault for nefariously duping civilians
into hiding in military targets! This was reminiscent of
the "they brought it on themselves" logic used by an
American official in Vietnam:
What the Vietcong did was occupy the hamlets we
pacified just for the purpose of having the allies
move in and bomb them. By their presence, the
hamlets were destroyed.[56]
During the coverage of the "bunker incident," one of the
very few occasions when civilian casualties were mentioned,
NBC anchor Tom Brokaw intoned, "We must point out again and
again that it is Saddam Hussein who put these innocents in
harm's way."[57]
Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the U.S.,
obtained permission to go into Iraq with a camera crew. His
group traveled 2000 miles across Iraq, from February 2 to
8th, examining civil damage in Baghdad, Basra, and Diwaniya.
There was no "collateral" military damage; all the
destruction was to civilians. We saw no evidence
of military presence in any of the bombed areas we
visited.[58]
Clark concluded that, "The air assault deliberately
targeting the civilian population of Iraq is a war crime."
In meeting the ultimate qualification for Orwellian
Newspeak, however, war has been classified as peace. Bush
told the U.S. Congress that a vote to give him war powers
offered the best chance for peace, and The New York Times
intoned, "Congress has armed the President, first and
foremost, for peace."[59] Canadian External Affairs Minister
Joe Clark commented that "What the world is doing in the
Gulf... [is] returning to the notion that peace should not
only be kept, but made."[60] Defence Minister Bill McKnight
told the House of Commons on November 30 that Canadian
forces "are there to enforce the world's condemnation of
Iraq. They are there to bring about peace and security in a
region where it is important."[61]
Returning to Mattelart, he illustrates the importance
of naming with an illustration from communication studies as
a discipline.
The term "means of communication" is rarely used
... and has been hidden behind the economically
and politically neutral terms "communication
media," "mass communication media," and
particularly "mass media." Thus the materiality
of the means of communications is obfuscated and
the immaterial aspects are emphasized.[62]
This point was later emphasized by Dallas Smythe, who
preferred the term "Consciousness Industries." The
obfuscating and misleading use of terms such as "operation,"
which was not only perpetrated by the Bush administration
but adopted wholesale by the media, is further evidence of
their perhaps unthinking, but nonetheless tangible,
complicity.
Dehumanizing the Iraqis
The massive bombing was undertaken and maintained in
order to crush Iraqi resistance and reduce the number of
U.S. body bags arriving home: another distasteful image of
Vietnam. Of course, in this manner the lives of American
troops were exchanged for those of thousands of Iraqi
soldiers and civilians. This was explained as a simple
exercise of "degrading the Iraqi army." This is a "rerun"
of the enormous casualties and devastation for the
Vietnamese civilian population in that war.[63]
One young pilot described the light show over Baghdad
as the "best I've seen since the fourth of July." Thus were
the Iraqis dehumanized. A U.S. pilot described what it was
like picking off Iraqi tanks along the Saudi border with
Kuwait: "It's almost like you flipped on the light in the
kitchen late at night and the cockroaches started scurrying
and we're killing them."[64]
This wasn't an isolated view. Marine pilot Lieutenant-
Colonel Dick White, describing for pool reporters what it
was like to see Iraqi troops in Kuwait from his plane, used
the same terms, saying "It was like turning on the kitchen
light late at night and the cockroaches started scurrying.
We finally got them out where we could find them and kill
them."[65] In addition, Iraqis were called "camel jockeys,"
and "sand niggers" -- an incredible epithet, given the large
proportion of Afro-American troops in the Gulf.
Citing as examples the use of "Japs," "Reds" (for the
Chinese), and "Vietcong," with its connotation of the Congo
and Blacks, Leonardo Acosta describes these as
"word-fetishes with a negative content."[66] Writing in The
Nation, an observer commented that:
One TV reporter told the nation after the first
8000 sorties had pulverized Iraqi forces, "Soon
we'll have to stop the air war and start killing
human beings."[67]
Like the military, journalists such as this one came to
subscribe to the view that they were merely shooting fish in
a barrel. Credence was lent to this perspective by the
Pentagon's refusal to release estimates of Iraqi civilian or
military casualties. Thus, while television showed film
footage of ducks immersed in oil slicks, victims of
Hussein's alleged "eco-terrorism," we were largely denied
access to the death and destruction wrought on the Iraqi
people. Commenting on one segment of Iraqi casualty
footage, NBC correspondent Dennis Murphy said "Until we get
some western reporters and photographers in there to vouch
for it, I think we'll have to call it propaganda." Anchor
Garrick Utley agreed, "That's a pretty good name for
it."[68]
Earlier, in order to help justify the war, the Iraqi
people were portrayed in a form of liberation discourse as
innocent victims of Hussein who had to be saved from him.
All of this is again reminiscent of Vietnam, as indicated
above.
A version of hate crime was perpetrated on
Arab-Americans, who were subjected to "arson, bomb threats,
and indiscriminate beatings,"[69] which served as tangible
evidence for the impact of the cooperative campaign by the
true coalition forces: the U.S. government,
military-industrial complex and mainstream media.
This racist attitude pervades the highest levels of
military and government. Bob Woodward writes that during
sensitive negotiations with the Saudis before the U.S. was
invited in, amongst Bush and his top advisers, "There was a
pessimism in the group about the Arabs in general. They
could not be relied on."[70]
Demonizing Saddam Hussein
In George Orwell's classic, 1984, Winston Smith's
Oceania is (at first) at war with Eurasia, which is led by
the Enemy of the People, Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein was
once one of the leading figures of the government Party of
Oceania, but now "was the primal traitor, the earliest
defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes
against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage,
heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his
teaching."[71]
Saddam Hussein, too, was once (and not very long ago) a
welcomed member of the fold. Prior to the August 2, 1990
invasion of Kuwait, he was an ally and friend to the U.S.
and the West, which armed and backed him in his eight-year
war with Iran, from 1980-1988. As early as 1975, The New
York Times, for example, characterized Iraq as "pragmatic,"
and "cooperative," with credit for this shift going to
Saddam's "personal strength."[72] During the Iran-Iraq war,
western leaders went to extraordinary lengths to find
excuses for Baghdad.
When an Iraqi warplane launched a French-made
missile that crippled the USS Stark, former U.S.
president Ronald Reagan not only quickly accepted
Baghdad's explanation but added that it was Iran
(whose tankers were the targets) that was really
at fault.[73]
As recently as November, 1989, the U.S. gave Iraq $1 billion
in loan assurances, second only to Mexico, and became Iraq's
largest trading partner.[74]
No longer. On February 1, 1991, a political cartoon on
the op-ed page of The New York Times titled "The descent of
man," showed in descending order: Clark Gable, a gorilla, a
monkey, a snake, and Saddam Hussein.[75] Hussein's rapid
fall from glory as America's champion in the war with Iran
has less to do with his (deserved) long-term reputation as a
brutal dictator and murderer, than it does with the fact
that, like Panama's General Manuel Noriega before him, he
became more useful as an enemy than as a friend. In this
respect his position was similar to that of the
democratically elected government of Iran, prior to the CIA
sponsored coup (led by the father of General Norman
Schwartzkopf) which installed the Shah of Iran in 1953.
In the spring of 1990, Iraq had massive debts of from
$70 to $100 billion U.S., incurred during the Iran-Iraq war,
including what it had hoped was $40 billion worth of
forgivable loans from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.[76] OPEC set
the price of oil at $18 per barrel in 1986, along with
production quotas to maintain that price. But Kuwait and
the United Arab Emirates exceeded their quotas, driving the
price down to around $13 in June 1990.[77] Meanwhile, Kuwait
was exporting vast amounts of oil at the deflated price,
some of which was being pumped from the Rumailah oilfield
straddling the border and jointly-owned with Iraq. This
harmed Iraq's ability to recover financially from the war
with Iran,[78] as oil constitutes 95 percent of Iraq's
exports. Hussein was desperate. As The New York Times
indicated on March 1, with the war safely over, "Iraq's
near-empty treasury has been both a cause of war and an
obstacle to its conclusion." One former diplomat was quoted
as saying, "They [Iraqis] were in a very tight condition
financially, which is why we had the invasion" of
Kuwait.[79]
On top of this, Iraq feared another Israeli or U.S.
attack, as the U.S. was grumbling about Saddam's military
buildup. In a July 1990 meeting with April Glaspie, U.S.
Ambassador to Iraq, Saddam was reassured that border
disputes between Iran and Kuwait were a local matter, and
the U.S. would not intervene. He may have interpreted this
as a green light from the U.S., similar to that involved in
his aggression against Iran.
Thus, the U.S. claims the right to defend its interests
by force, according to the official view presented in
justification of its invasion of Panama,[80] and as
indicated by its very presence in the Persian Gulf. Other
leaders and countries which operate under the same
philosophy are portrayed as the Antichrist.
This is some of the background to the invasion of
Kuwait, not to be found in mainstream media bent on
portraying Saddam as another "Hitler," or a madman whose
ruthless acts are unsupported by rhyme or reason. The Globe
and Mail, for example, in an editorial titled: "The world
unites against Saddam Hussein," commented on the day the war
began that "The world faces war in the Middle East because
of the intransigence of one man."[81] After the war, The
Globe commented, "The defeat of evil on the other side
certainly justifies great satisfaction, as does the
successful defence of important coalition interests."[82]
Just as the ground war was coming to an end, The New York
Times led off an editorial by proclaiming, "At every chance,
Saddam Hussein has worked to make himself the most hated man
in the world."[83]
In a television interview in mid-April, former U.S.
President Richard Nixon called Hussein "an international
menace," and said if he was still the president, he would
have had Hussein killed.
If I could find a way to get him out of there,
even putting a contract out on him, if the CIA
still did that sort of a thing, assuming it ever
did, I would be for it.[84]
One of the most striking portrayals of Hussein was in
The New York Post. When Hussein used a video which included
him shown patting the head of one of his child hostages, the
newspaper ran a photo on its front page, with the screaming
headline: "Child Abuser."[85]
All of which is not to say that Hussein is anything
other than a vicious thug. But as Noam Chomsky notes,
"Saddam Hussein is a murderous gangster, just as he was
before August 2, when he was an amiable friend and favored
trading partner."[86] It is the hypocrisy,
misrepresentation, and unnecessary death and destruction
that rankles.
The Terrorist Threat
A small army navy surplus store in Windsor, Ontario had
a run on an unusual item -- gas masks. Ultimately, they
sold out. For weeks, the North American media had been
running stories on Israeli preparations for Saddam's use of
chemical warfare. Reporters' voices were muffled and
camerapersons' vision blurred, as they followed instructions
and sat in plastic-sealed rooms, wearing their gas masks,
distributed free to Israelis by their government. It took a
court decision to force them to distribute the masks to
Palestinians living in the West Bank as well. Families
provided guided tours to journalists, showing them their
"safe" rooms, with the food stores and plastic lining. The
coverage intensified as the occasional Scud missile landed
in Tel Aviv, or Haifa.
Scrambling for Gulf-related stories which can be
"localized," the media reported on gas mask sales, and
"terrorist" threats which seemingly were synonymous with
mention of the word "Palestinian." Symptomatic of the
hysteria over terrorism, CBS anchor Dan Rather asked the FBI
director whether Jewish Americans should send their children
to school the next day. Air travel was down. People were
buying gas masks, 20,000 kilometers away from the Middle
East.
This scenario brings to mind a scene from Ray
Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where the people are holed-up in
their homes, watching on the video screens as the police
search for terrorists.
Gas masks and air travel indicate that, like the media,
the public managed to "localize" the Middle East crisis. It
seems reasonable to conclude that the real or imagined
terrorist threat served this purpose, while simultaneously
heightening the demonization of Hussein and dehumanization
of Iraqis and Arabs generally.
The Iraqi War Machine
Exploiting the alleged "terrorist threat" was a major
means of justifying the Gulf War, as was the emphasis on the
chemical weapons threat, the mystique of the
"battle-hardened," elite Republican Guard, and the portrayal
of tiny Iraq -- a nation of 18 million with an economy
devastated from eight years of war, and an army of
conscripts -- as the "fourth largest army in the world."
Prior to the ground war which began on February 24, the U.S.
estimated the number of Iraqi troops in the "Kuwaiti theatre
of operations" as 540,000, with some estimates rising as
high as 1,000,000. Afterwards, estimates were revised
downwards to between 200,000 and 320,000. "We'll never
know, and it really doesn't matter," one U.S.
Administration official said cavalierly.[87] Iraqi defenses
of bunkers, fire pits, and minefields, "terrifyingly
portrayed in newspaper graphics around the world," were
"much less formidable in reality."[88]
Yet, the Pentagon kept silent beforehand about what
they afterwards termed, the "hollow Iraqi threat."[89] In
fact, just as Bush was calling a halt to the military
offensive at the end of February, The New York Times was
busy relaying Schwarzkopf's justification for the ground
offensive.
A bold strike was needed, [Schwarzkopf] said,
because the Iraqis outnumbered the allies 3 to 2
overall and 2 to 1 in fighting forces, when the
offense classically needs a 3-to-1 superiority
over the defense.[90]
Terrorists have no scruples, so Saddam Hussein was
expected to use chemical weapons on civilians. Indeed, in
the early days of the war with the first Scud attack on
Israel, CBC national radio news reported that a mustard gas
attack was underway. In fact, the Americans were the only
ones to use chemical warfare, in the form of napalm. (Of
course, we were told that it was only used to set fire to
oil in ditches dug by the Iraqis to defend against tanks.
We were to believe that all of the napalm, a deadly
incendiary gel, fell on ditches rather than troops.) The
admitted use of napalm by the Americans was buried in the
war coverage.[91] Contrast this with the prominent coverage
afforded to charges by Shiite rebels that Iraqi government
forces "massacred thousands of people in napalm attacks," in
fighting following the war. The coverage of the napalm
issue also exemplified the media's predilection for favoring
the military position, when contrasting views were
available.[92]
Additionally, the so-called "Butcher of Baghdad" was
supposedly responsible for other atrocities: such as the
charge that 300 newborn Kuwaiti infants were killed in
hospitals by invading Iraqis. This charge was later denied
by Kuwaitis, following their "liberation."[93] Unreported by
the mainstream media was the fact that forty infants were in
incubators, mothers at their sides, at Baghdad's Saddam
Central Children's Hospital the night the U.S. bombs began
to fall.
First the electricity went out. With the thunder
of war all around, the mothers were
panic-stricken. In their desperation, they
grabbed their children and rushed them into the
basement. Six hours later, 20 of the babies were
dead from lack of life support.[94]
Another aspect of this highly functional portrayal of
Iraq involved "eco-terrorism," over the Gulf oil spills.
Late in January, an oil slick was reported in the Persian
Gulf. The U.S. blamed Iraq for an intentional release of
oil from Kuwaiti facilities. Bush said Saddam's "scorched
water strategy" was "kinda sick."[95] While much attention
has been paid to Iraq's destruction of Kuwaiti oil
facilities, very little has been paid to the U.S. bombing of
Iraqi oil refineries, rigs, tankers, and other targets,
resulting in widespread spills. U.S. bombers also knocked
out the civilian water supply to major cities like Baghdad,
bombed water purification plants, and operational nuclear
facilities,[96] all bona fide acts of eco-terrorism.
The Final Resort
In late January George Bush told the National
Association of Religious Broadcasters that the Gulf War was
a "last resort" after "extraordinary" diplomatic efforts had
been tried and failed.[97] This was the U.S.
administration's "diplomacy has failed" line, which usually
was dutifully reported by the media. The New York Times,
for example, noted on January 20 that "now that diplomacy
has failed and it has come to war...."[98]
In reality of course, the Bush administration blocked
all efforts at reaching a peaceful settlement, while
continuing to pay lip service to it. The economic embargo
was only in effect for five months, and was not given a
chance (given, of course, the dubious assumption that "we"
had the right to establish such an embargo in the first
place). Both Zbigniew Brzezinski and Admiral William Crowe,
former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that
the question was not whether the embargo would work, but
whether the United States had the patience to let it work.
The CIA reported in early December that the embargo was
already seriously affecting the civilian economy, and Iraq's
military could maintain its level of readiness for no more
than nine months. Noting this in The Globe and Mail, Morris
Wolfe commented, "Unfortunately, Bush didn't have the
'courage of patience,' to use Eisenhower's apt phrase."[99]
As early as August 12, 1990, Hussein offered to
withdraw completely from Kuwait if others too would withdraw
from occupied Arab lands: specifically, Syria from Lebanon,
and Israel from the territories it conquered in 1967. The
Financial Times of London suggested that this offered "a
path away from disaster ... through negotiation." The Bush
administration, however, dismissed it with utter
derision.[100] So too did Barbara Walters of ABC's
Nightline, who characterized Hussein's proposal as: "Unless
you solve all the problems of the Middle East, we're going
to stay in Kuwait."[101]
Hussein also offered to withdraw if an international
conference were held on the Palestinian question. On August
23, Iraq offered to withdraw from Kuwait and to allow
foreigners to leave in return for the lifting of sanctions,
guaranteed access to the Gulf, and full control of the
Rumailah oil field. Although a Mideast affairs specialist
in the Bush administration described this proposal as
"serious" and "negotiable," the White House responded that
it "had not been taken seriously because Mr. Bush demands
the unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait."[102]
When, in late February, Iraq agreed to a Soviet
proposal for unconditional withdrawal over three weeks, even
this was not adequate: it had to be done according to Bush's
timeframe of one week. Because the Soviet/Iraqi peace plan
called for the removal of economic sanctions once the
withdrawal was complete -- sanctions which only existed
because of the invasion in the first place -- this was seen
as a "conditional" peace offer, and hence unacceptable.[103]
Of course, Soviet motives were also portrayed as
suspect.[104] Bush's desire for a total military victory led
him to reject the proposal, which failed only in its
inability to match Bush's escalating demands. Bush was
uncompromising in that he offered no opportunity for Hussein
to save face. The New York Times commented, "American
officials are confident that American and allied forces are
on the verge of a decisive military victory and are seeking
a peace settlement that is the political equivalent of a
rout."[105]
Opposition to Bush's hard-line stance was non-existent
in the mainstream media. For example, Democratic House
Majority Leader Richard Gephardt was quoted as saying that,
"The president spoke this morning for the entire country
when he reiterated our insistence on an immediate withdrawal
by Iraq."[106]
In Canada, William Thorsell of The Globe and Mail
celebrated the use of force, rather than a peaceful
resolution. "We did a lot of things right in managing this
conflict," he wrote. "We were not distracted by Mr.
Hussein's last-minute efforts to extract political points in
defeat through a negotiated settlement."[107] Far better to
mete out death and destruction than to allow "political
points."
In keeping with the U.S. administration's aim to "kick
the Vietnam Syndrome," thousands of peace demonstrations
went virtually unreported. When they received any coverage,
peace activists were portrayed as unreasonable hysterics and
fanatical leftists. The media referred to the "anti-war
rhetoric" of the "peaceniks," as contrasted with the
"technical analysis" provided by the generals.[108]
The Limited Range of Debate
Much of the above describes the limited range of the
debate carried in the mainstream media. But how did the
media conduct and portray the debate over their own role in
covering the war? Some attention was given to broader
issues, such as media complicity, oil interests, and
economic imperatives.[109] But just about all of the
navel-gazing and criticism was of the "safe," conformist
variety.[110] For example, CBC radio's Media File (now
defunct), which in many respects provided an unusually
diverse service, presented the views of two journalism
professors. The "critical" one argued that the media
behaved irresponsibly, by reporting inaccurately in their
rush to be first with the news. The "fawning" one argued
that criticism arises out of print journalists' envy of TV,
which can provide "history in real time," where you can "see
the facts," and "see a Patriot missile destroy a Scud."
Hence, despite the inaccuracies, getting the news to
consumers fast is worth it.
The extremely safe and non-threatening criticism found
on Media File demonstrates how the mainstream media
generally preclude critical perspectives. Not only is the
content distorted, but the discussion of that distorted
content itself is confined to the very limited perspective
of "two sides,"[111] (of the same coin) fulfilling the need
for "balance" and the myth of "objectivity." Despite
occasional references in the media to some of the issues and
viewpoints outlined above, the vast infotainment glut on the
Gulf War followed the Bush agenda as faithfully as any
Ministry of Propaganda.
To do otherwise would be to exceed what Chomsky calls,
"The Bounds of the Expressible" which, again, illustrate the
genius of "brainwashing under freedom." The distinction
drawn by Chomsky parallels Gramsci's notion of "civil
society" versus "political society," with the former
characterized as "private," "hegemonic" and operating by
"consensus," while the latter is the State, which uses
"direct domination and force." Ultimately Gramsci argued
that the political society subsumes the civil.[112]
Referring to the Vietnam context, Chomsky wrote:
In a totalitarian system, it is required only that
official doctrine be obeyed. In the democratic
systems of thought control, it is deemed necessary
to take over the entire spectrum of discussion:
nothing must remain thinkable apart from the Party
Line. State propaganda is often not expressed,
merely presupposed as the framework for discussion
among right-minded people. The debate, there-
fore, must be between the "doves" and "hawks," the
Schlesingers and the Alsops. The position that
the US is engaged in aggression, and that such
aggression is wrong, must remain unthinkable and
unexpressed.[113]
Authorized Knowers and Common Sense
Like Vietnam before it, the Gulf War was fought to
preserve global economic interests (a topic which is
addressed in the next section). The mass media, as we have
seen, function as the delivery system for elite ideology.
As indicated above, the result is what Herman and Chomsky
have termed the "doctrinal consensus," which is "based on
serviceability to important domestic power interests."[114]
Fundamental to this consensus is "the subordination of the
media to the requirements of the state propaganda
system."[115] Obviously, this is a complex topic about which
numerous authors have written numerous books. Our goal here
is to focus on two related aspects of this situation, as
they apply to the media role in the Gulf War: the use of
authorized knowers, and the development of a "common sense"
perspective.
As they do on a daily basis, during the Gulf War the
media exercised a form of self-censorship by relying
extensively, if not exclusively, on what has been
characterized as "elite authorized knowers."[116] As
generalists, newsworkers rely on specialist sources for the
quotes, opinions and interpretations contained in their
ostensibly "objective" stories. Indeed, the myth of
objectivity, which is still pervasive in journalism,
although increasingly expressed in terms such as "balance,"
or "neutrality," is one of the underlying driving forces
behind the use of official sources.[117] Unable to overtly
opine themselves, given the pretext of objectivity,[118]
journalists, editors, and producers actively frame their
stories and then seek out sources who will support their
perspective. They also allow themselves to be willing
conduits for their sources.
The sources relied upon overwhelmingly tend to be
official in nature: politicians, corporate leaders,
academics, members of "nonpartisan" think-tanks, and so on.
One 30-month study at the University of Minnesota, for
example, looked at the three major U.S. networks.
Correspondents and producers established a pattern
of returning time and again to a very small group
of the same experts... They tend to be men rather
than women, East Coasters rather than West, and
Republicans (along with a few conservative
Democrats) rather than critics of the political
establishment. Also favored by television news
are ex-government officials (mostly from
Republican administrations) and "scholars" from
conservative Washington D.C. think tanks who
appear to be more steeped in political
partisanship than in academic credentials.[119]
Leon Sigal found that U.S. government officials made up
almost half of all sources cited in stories beginning on
page one of The New York Times and The Washington Post.[120]
A content analysis of the three Toronto papers indicated
that from 80 to 90 percent of the stories reflected
"official news" such as government coverage, press
conferences, speeches, press releases, crime and the courts,
rather than coverage stemming from the newspapers' own
initiative.[121]
The use of authorized knowers helps to maintain the
image of objectivity, and protects the media from charges of
bias. It makes journalists' work easier; rather than
reading that lengthy tome you've written, they merely ask
you to sum it up in a sentence or two. We saw this in the
Gulf War, where journalists ostensibly covering "the war,"
were ensconced in hotel rooms hundreds of kilometers from
the action, wearing army fatigues and watching press
conferences on television. The use of retired generals and
other military experts was pervasive. Moreover, the media
hung on every official word spoken by Defense Secretary Dick
Cheney, Colin Powell of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gulf
forces commander Norman Schwartzkopf, George Bush, etc.
Yet, the media/source relationship is symbiotic.
Sources make newsworkers' jobs easier, while media deliver
sources' propaganda, free of charge and with an added
credibility component. When George Bush says we've kicked
the Vietnam syndrome, the public may remain skeptical, but
it's likely that skepticism will wear down under the
constant repetition by The New York Times, the television
news, and so forth. In short, as Ericson, et al. sum it up,
the news is "framed so as to translate sources' politically
interested views into a seemingly apolitical, no-nonsense,
common-sense view."[122]
This common sense view is in certain respects, with
apologies to Walter Lippmann, the picture we carry around in
our heads. It is a type of conventional wisdom, which is
inherent in one's world view, for example, the view that
communism is bad, or that capitalism is synonymous with
democracy, or indeed the notion of a Vietnam syndrome
discussed earlier, and just what this is.[123] Stuart Hall
argues that such "preferred codes" as these:
have been rendered invisible by the process of
ideological masking and taking-for-granted....
They seem to be, even to those who employ and
manipulate them for the purposes of encoding,
simply the "sum of what we already know."[124]
Given our limited first-hand exposure to world events,
journalists play a crucial role in formulating our common
sense perspectives. As Ericson, et al. note, "His (sic) is
the power of news transformation, constructing as part of
the common sense what most people do not know
otherwise."[125]
As was the case with Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua,
Grenada, Tripoli, and a myriad of international and national
events before them, this is the legacy of the Gulf War.
[News] shapes not only our knowledge of the world,
but also our knowledge of how to know. In
transforming the bureaucratic knowledge of other
social controllers into the common sense,
journalists are simultaneously providing citizens
with a means not to know.[126]
This then is the crux of the epistemological problem for
those prominently displaying their flags and yellow ribbons,
the patriots Bush described as heroes without uniforms: They
neither know, nor know how to know.
The U.S. -- Mercenaries to the World
Elements of an alternative perspective on the Gulf War
have been outlined above. What's missing is an answer to
the "why" question: why did the Bush administration
perpetrate this war? Implicitly, we've rejected the
conventional explanation that it was to "liberate Kuwait,"
or as an ingenious placard held by demonstrator Robert
Letcher in the January 26 Washington demonstration put it,
to "Restore Kuwait's Legitimate Dictator!"
Of course, the so-called "wimp factor" undoubtedly
played a role, as Bush evidently found this label to be
quite disconcerting, and probably relished the thought of
shedding it for good.[127] The immediate aftermath indicated
that this worked, as The New York Times commented: "The war
provided a clarity and passion to Mr. Bush's leadership that
had been missing. He seemed more focused, more constant in
purpose, and less a chameleon of public opinion. . . . Mr.
Bush appeared to be acting from strong, unequivocal
beliefs."[128] An added bonus is his subsequent rise in the
polls, and attainment of a support rating in excess of 90
percent: even higher than it was following the Panama
invasion and operation "Just Cause." Within days, The Times
was expounding on his excellent re-election chances.[129]
But much more was at stake than George Bush's personal pride
or political future.
Economist Tom Riddell argues that throughout the
post-World War II period, the U.S. has functioned as a
global police force. War, or the threat of war, has been
used by the multinational corporate elite to protect their
national and global economic interests. Hence, both old and
new "world orders," or the U.S. sphere of influence, in
Chomsky's terms, has consisted of the following:
The promotion of international trade; open access
to markets, raw materials, cheap labor, and
investment opportunities; and a set of trading and
financial institutions that primarily benefited
multinational corporations and the already
developed countries. [It promotes] profitability
and economic growth. Military assistance to
cooperative regimes, global military power, and
frequent interventions were used to reinforce this
order and to support U.S. hegemony within it. ...
War, then, is the ultimate prop for the global
capitalist system under U.S. leadership, when
power itself is insufficient to determine the
course of events and relationships. In this
sense, the U.S. intervention in the Middle East is
about protecting access to oil, preserving jobs
(Baker), and continuing the "American way of life"
(Bush).[130]
In the post-Cold War period, the U.S. military
establishment is facing drastic cutbacks. With Satan
himself (a "communist" USSR) no longer around to justify
exorbitant military expenditures on "defense," it becomes
necessary to invent new enemies, some of whom may be former
friends and allies, such as Panama's Manuel Noriega, or
Saddam Hussein. The unsavory alternative is to reduce
military spending, possibly diverting the funding to social
programs, and towards the huge federal deficit, estimated at
$300 billion for 1991.
Bush chose to use the enormous military expenditures to
relieve the economic depression, all the while reducing
spending on social programs. The beauty of this approach is
that the costs of the war have been more than paid for by
foreign pledges -- so, the U.S. global police force is
actually mercenaries! The Saudis, Kuwait, the United Arab
Emirates, Japan, Germany, and Korea have pledged from $40 to
$50 billion to the war effort, a total which it was
estimated would finance the war for three months.[131] Since
the war lasted for less than two months, it turns out to be
profitable for the military, as well as the corporations
falling over themselves to rebuild Kuwait. (With preference
going to American companies, and bidders pre-ranked
according to their national war effort.) Or as The Times
put it, with "the Kuwaiti policy of favoring the ally that
has done the most fighting."[132]
Just as the ground war was coming to an end, The Times
reported that:
In the rush for postwar business deals, American
companies have won about 70 percent of the roughly
200 contracts signed so far, worth more than $800
million.[133]
By February 28, 1991, we learned that the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers had a $45 million contract to "help manage the
recovery program" in the first 90 days after the war. That
is, the army arranged contracts for U.S. businesses said to
be "burning up the phones" with eagerness to get in on the
rebuilding.[134] Total U.S. trade with Kuwait for the first
five months of 1991 was $1.5 billion; the total for all of
1989 was $53 million.[135] Who says war doesn't pay?
Thus Bush was at least potentially able to deliver on
his promise not to raise taxes to finance the Gulf War -- he
didn't need to, it was financed abroad. Of course, with the
ground war pending and victory at hand, he immediately asked
Congress for $15 billion.[136]
The question that occurs is, if the U.S. and other
countries were willing to spend all of this money waging
war, and if Iraq's dire economic straits were a major
contributing factor in its invasion of Kuwait in the first
place, why weren't financial arrangements simply made, such
as forgiving some of the Iraqi debts to Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia? Why wasn't there a negotiated settlement? Chomsky
argues that the U.S. blocked the diplomatic track because it
didn't want the crisis defused at the cost of a few token
gains for Iraq: no outcome would be tolerated other than
Iraqi capitulation to U.S. force.[137]
In mid-August, 1991, we learned from a Congressional
report that U.S. weapons sales to the Third World more than
doubled in 1990, to $18.5 billion, from $8 billion in 1989.
This includes $14.5 billion in U.S. weapons for Saudi
Arabia, most of which was supplied after the invasion of
Kuwait. Additionally, the report said, "The White House is
planning to ask Congress for another massive weapons sale to
Saudi Arabia of some $14.5 billion in fighters, tanks and
other arms."[138]
This may go a long way toward explaining why the war
took place, when economic sanctions were "working." Still,
the answer to the "why" question is evidently complex, and
has already been the sole subject of several lengthy
articles. In his analysis, Colin Gordon sums up the reasons
for the war as the U.S. "Acting on traditional and mundane
concerns for the stability of commodity markets and world
trade, and for its credibility as a world power."[139] But
whether or not this is entirely true, or the entire truth,
it is evident that the public justifications proffered by
Bush were just plain drivel, yet were swallowed wholesale by
the media.
A final word must be said about the plight of the
Kurdish refugees. As Edward Herman noted,
There has even been a tilt back in [Hussein's]
favor as a counterweight to more fearsome local
nationalist extremists. The fact that Bush
repeatedly urged the Iraqis to overthrow the
tyrant, and then stood by while the tyrant
slaughtered them, I have seen mentioned only in
Doug Ireland's column in the Village Voice.[140]
The Kurdish people have paid an enormous price for the U.S.
administration's successful efforts to thwart Iraqi
democracy.[141] But such "nationalist extremists" of course
represent a greater threat to U.S. interests than do brutal
dictators.
Conclusions
As stated at the outset, my goals for this paper have
been twofold: first, to demonstrate how the media presented
a united front on the political, economic, and military
goals of the Persian Gulf War; and second, to delineate the
hidden corporate or State apparatus interests which were not
posed by the media and which are fundamental to a
counter-hegemonic perspective.
This analysis identifies the mainstream media's role in
the Gulf War as both a cohesive and integral part of the
State apparatus, or what I have termed simply "the Bush
administration." There is very strong, if not unequivocal,
evidence for Gramsci's "unison of economic and political
aims," as well as "intellectual and moral unity," in this
reading of media reportage.
Consequently, insofar as this case study is concerned,
there is an obvious choice between the competing theories of
"normative consensus," represented by political economy, and
the "media pluralism" of U.S. cultural studies, with the
former strongly favored over the latter. Diversity of
content was restricted almost entirely to alternative media,
notorious for their limited readership. The occasional
exceptions which found their way into the consciousness
industry outlets were "engulfed."
Despite his pre-eminent position as representative of
the British school of cultural studies (which differs
significantly from the American variant), Stuart Hall has
provided the following explanation for what he terms the
"pivotal and commanding notion of hegemony":
The "definitions of reality" favourable to the
dominant class ... come to constitute the primary
"lived reality" as such for the subordinate
classes. In this way ideology provides the
"cement" in a social formation, "preserving the
ideological unity of the entire social bloc."
This operates, not because the dominant classes
can prescribe and proscribe, in detail, the mental
content of the lives of subordinate classes ...
but because they strive and to a degree succeed in
framing all competing definitions of reality
within their range, bringing all alternatives
within their horizon of thought.[142]
Mainstream media framing of the Gulf War thus succeeded in
limiting reality to within the "common sense" range of the
dominant ideology.
Some would defend the media with the excuse that they
were censored, and thus had no choice. This simply doesn't
hold water. Censorship doesn't prevent the asking of
questions, it merely inhibits the provision of some answers.
The alternative media, which continued questioning and
seeking answers and context, portrayed a very different
picture of events, all the while suffering from even greater
censorship. Additionally, if the problem were limited to
one of censorship, then the media would have altered their
portrayal since the war ended. This has largely not
happened. Thus, a form of self-censorship may be identified
as the major problem, and the albeit existent military
censorship merely afforded a convenient scapegoat. In
blaming the military, the mainstream media reinforced the
common sense mythology of a pluralistic power structure and
the "normal" objectivity of the media. In the process, the
separate reality recounted herein was virtually excluded
from what journalist A.J. Liebling called, "a monovocal,
monopolistic, monocular press."
Finally, this brings us to the debate both between the
cultural studies variants and between political economy and
cultural studies, over the "effects" on audiences. While
this is not an "effects" study, certain inferences have been
made about resultant audience attitudes and behavior, such
as the ubiquitous yellow ribbons and flag-waving; the
disregard and even intolerance for anything remotely
constituting criticism of the war effort. It is my position
that this anecdotal evidence, buttressed by polls which
showed overwhelming support for both Bush and the war,
points to the success of the media as a hegemonic apparatus
to the state. The effects, such as they were, may not have
been monolithic, any more than was the media content (the
U.S. use of napalm was reported on the front page of The New
York Times, after all), but both might be accurately
described as "overwhelming." We will leave the final word
to Stuart Hall, who notes,
Audiences, whose decodings will inevitably reflect
their own material and social conditions, will not
necessarily decode events within the same
ideological structures as those in which they have
been encoded. But the overall intention of
"effective communication" must, certainly, be to
"win the consent" of the audience to the preferred
reading, and hence to get him [sic] to decode
within the hegemonic framework. Even when
decodings are not made through a "perfect
transmission," within the hegemonic framework, the
great range of decodings will tend to be
'negotiations' within the dominant codes -- giving
them a more situational inflexion -- rather than
systematically decoding them in a
counter-hegemonic way.[143]
Notes
[1] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, pp. 19-20,
Harper & Row, N.Y., 1965. (First edition 1958).
[2] The station and newsworkers will not be identified, in
order not to jeopardize future research. However, the
quoted address was broadcast as part of a local
newscast on Saturday March 9, 1991, in Detroit. The
author wishes to thank Pamela Cote, now a graduate
student in our department, for her research assistance.
The account of the Detroit TV station comes from Cote's
course paper.
[3] Richard Ericson, Patricia Baranek, and Janet Chan,
Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization,
University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1987, pp. 28, 31.
[4] Antonio Gramsci, "Analysis of Situations: Relations of
Force," from Selections From The Prison Notebooks,
reprinted in David Forgacs (Ed.), An Antonio Gramsci
Reader, Schocken Books, New York, 1989, pp. 205-206.
[5] Armand Mattelart, "Introduction: For A Class Analysis of
Communication," in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub,
(Eds.), Communication and Class Struggle, Vol. I,
Capitalism, Imperialism, International General, New
York, 1979, p. 66, Footnote 93.
[6] Cf. Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication:
Global Culture and the economics of Information, Sage,
London, 1990.
[7] Ericson, et al., Visualizing Deviance, p. 10.
[8] Ericson, et al., p. 348. Although the authors
specifically are discussing journalistic freedoms
rather than diversity of output, the latter is implied.
They go on to say that "Through skilful mobilization of
organizational resources the journalist can create some
autonomous space in which to practise his craft. The
journalist who is articulate in the vocabulary of
precedents has the power to turn organizational
constraints to advantage. . . . Indeed, this is what
makes the system work" (p. 349). This notion of a
"working system" is contrasted with the view in some of
the literature where "A picture emerges of great
normative consensus among journalists, who thus appear
as automatons in the mass-media production process" (p.
350). Contrasting their own research with that of Gaye
Tuchman, for example, the authors, like the journalists
they studied, "see the potential for negotiating
alternative ideas, approaches and outcomes" in the
newsroom and resultant media content. Consequently,
"the range available is better visualized in terms of
the number of windows in a modern multi-story newspaper
office building than as 'a window on the world'."
[9] John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic, University of Toronto
Press, Toronto, 1965.
[10] Wallace Clement, The Canadian Corporate Elite, Carleton
University Press, Ottawa, 1975, pp. 278-279.
[11] Clement, p. 297.
[12] Clement, p. 287.
[13] John Fiske, "Popular Television and Commercial Culture:
Beyond Political Economy," in Gary Burns and Robert
Thompson, Television Studies: Textual Analysis,
Praeger, N.Y., 1989, pp. 27-30.
[14] Fiske, "Popular Television..." p. 31.
[15] Maureen Dowd, "War Introduces Nation to a Tougher
Bush," The New York Times, March 2, 1991, p. A1.
[16] "What Does Bush Mean?," Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, p.
42.
[17] Noam Chomsky, comments during a public lecture in
Detroit, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church,
Friday September 20, 1991.
[18] From the Associated Press, "Bush greets soldiers
returning from gulf," as reported in The Windsor Star,
March 18, 1991, p. A8. Also, from television news
coverage of the ceremonies on March 17, 1991.
[19] As noted this is a myth largely put to rest, at least
in the Canadian context, by John Porter's work.
[20] Mattelart, "Introduction..." p. 45.
[21] Garnham, Capitalism and Communication, p. 20
[22] David Sholle, "Reading the Audience, Reading
Resistance: Prospects and Problems," Journal of Film
and Video, 43:1,2, Spring & Summer 1991, p. 82. Sholle
goes on to note that "Fiske's reputation as a
popularizer of this work, and his growing status as
exemplary of American cultural studies, makes it all
the more important to question the theoretical
weaknesses of his position."
[23] In an article in The New York Times, the Deputy Under
Secret- ary of Defense to Ronald Reagan defined "the
Vietnam syndrome" as "a reluctance to engage in any
overseas military operations and to provide the
wherewithal to do so." He also referred to its
"exorcism" by the Gulf War. Dov S. Zakheim, "Is the
Vietnam syndrome dead? Happily it's buried in the
Gulf," The New York Times, March 4, 1991, p. A17.
[24] Cf. "Quiddity," Z Magazine, Vol. 4:3, March 1991,
Boston, p. 3.
[25] These authors have been prolific on this topic, but see
in particular, "The Indochina Wars (I): Vietnam,"
Chapter 5, pp. 169-252, in Edward Herman and Noam
Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy
of The Mass Media," Pantheon, N.Y., 1988.
[26] The concept of "common sense" has been elaborated by
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, Basic Books, N.Y.,
1983. Its properties are that it is natural,
practical, thin, ad hoc, and accessible. As Ericson,
et al. comment, "These charateristics make common sense
seem so obvious that it is difficult to reflect on it,
let alone analyze it." (p.17)
[27] Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 179-180.
[28] Herman and Chomsky, p. 183.
[29] Herman and Chomsky, p. 220.
[30] Herman and Chomsky, p. 199.
[31] Noam Chomsky, "The Carter Administration: Myth and
Reality," in C.P. Otero (Ed.), Noam Chomsky's Radical
Priorities, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 2nd Ed., 1981,
p. 141.
[32] Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, CBC Enterprises,
Toronto, 1989.
[33] Cf. Peter Braestrup, Big Story, 2 Vols, Westview,
Boulder, 1977. Freedom House, according to Herman and
Chomsky, "has long served as a virtual propaganda arm
of the government and international right wing" (p.
28). Ironically, Braestrup appears to have changed his
mind. Quoted in Richard Valeriani, "Talking Back to
the Tube," Columbia Journalism Review, March/April
1991, Braestrup said "A lot of the military are living
a myth -- that TV news had a decisive effect [on]
public support for the war in Vietnam.... People don't
need television to impress upon them the realities of
war."
[34] Herman and Chomsky, p. 27.
[35] Mattelart, "Introduction..." p. 45.
[36] Murray Campbell, "A nation bound and determined to
present a united front," The Globe and Mail, February
18, 1991, p. A12.
[37] Eric Coppolino, "Support Troops: Crush Dissent," Letter
in Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, Boston, p. 6. Taken
from the Student Leader News Service, New Paltz, N.Y.
[38] The Nation, Vol. 252:9, March 11, 1991, p. 291.
[39] Richard Valeriani, "Talking Back to the Tube," Columbia
Journalism Review, March/April, 1991, p. 27.
[40] "Gulf War Responses," furnished by The Public Eye, and
published in Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, p. 32.
[41] Valeriani, "Talking Back to the Tube," p. 28.
[42] Michael Albert, "Loose Ends," Z magazine, 4:3, March
1991, p. 11.
[43] Noam Chomsky, "'What we say Goes': The Middle East in
the new world order," Z Magazine, 4:5, May 1991, p. 60.
[44] This quotation is taken from a statement by my
colleague from Concordia University in Montreal, Dr.
Jody Berland, who was speaking at a round-table
discussion on the media and the Gulf War, held at the
annual conference of the Canadian Communication
Association, Queen's University, Kingston Ont., May 31,
1991.
[45] For a brief recounting, see Jim Winter, "Gulf war
distracting voters from other woes," The Windsor Star,
January 29, 1991, p. A7.
[46] Michael Valpy, "Canadians gung ho on war, survey
finds," The Globe and Mail, March 20, 1991, p. A7.
Valpy is quoting from the results of a survey by
University of Lethbridge, Alta., sociologist Reginald
Bibby.
[47] Jim Winter, "Gulf war distracting voters from other
woes," The Windsor Star, January 29, 1991 p. A7.
[48] Mattelart, "Introduction..." p. 68.
[49] William Thorsell, "The gulf war: For once, the good
guys got almost everything right," The Globe and Mail,
March 2, 1991, p. D6.
[50] Mattelart, "Introduction..." p. 49.
[51] George Bush, address to the troops at the welcome home
ceremony in Sumter S.C., March 17, 1991. Covered live
on CNN.
[52] Reuters and AP, "Iraqi troops buried alive, Pentagon
admits: 'No nice way to kill somebody in war,'
Washington spokesman says," The Globe and Mail,
September 13, 1991, p. A12.
[53] CP, "Penguins reach first cup final," Windsor Star, May
13, 1991, p. C1.
[54] Holly Sklar, "Buried stories from media gulf," Z
Magazine, Vol. 4:3, March 1991, p. 58. Cf. Matthew
Fisher and Colin MacKenzie, "Toll on Iraqis
'horrendous,' U.S. believes," The Globe and Mail, Feb.
20, 1991, p. A14.
[55] Colin MacKenzie, "Desertions, understaffed units eroded
the threat of Iraqi army," The Globe and Mail, March
19, 1991, p. A1.
[56] Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon,
N.Y., 1988, p. 221.
[57] Metta Spencer, "Prisoners of our own minds: Censorship
and the Gulf war," The Whig-Standard Magazine, August
31, 1991 p. 5.
[58] Ramsey Clark, "A War Crime," The Nation, 252:9, March
11, 1991, p. 309.
[59] Edward Herman, "Gulfspeak II," Z Magazine, 4:3, March
1991, pp. 15-16.
[60] Joe Clark, "Make peace by force," quoted in "Just what
was said," The Globe and Mail, November 12, 1990, p.
A18.
[61] "What was said: Canada's role in the gulf," The Ottawa
Citizen, January 23, 1991.
[62] Mattelart, "Introduction..." p. 46.
[63] Edward Herman, "Mere Arabs," Z Magazine, 4:2, February
1991, p. 72.
[64] Holly Sklar, "Buried stories from media gulf," p. 60.
[65] Murray Campbell, "A nation bound and determined to
present a united front," p. A12.
[66] Leonardo Acosta, "Mass Media and Imperialist Ideology,"
in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub (Eds.),
Communication and Class Struggle, Vol. 1, International
General, N.Y., 1979, p. 147.
[67] Lloyd DeMause, "The Gulf War as Mental Disorder," The
Nation, 252:9, March 11, 1991, p. 307.
[68] Metta Spencer, "Prisoners..." p. 5.
[69] Editorial, "Home-grown hatemongers," The New York
Times, February 27, 1991, p. A14.
[70] Bob Woodward, The Commanders, Simon and Schuster, N.Y.,
1991. Quoted from an excerpt published in the Toronto
Star, May 3, 1991, p. A23.
[71] George Orwell, 1984, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, N.Y.,
1949, p. 14.
[72] Christopher Hitchens, "Why we are stuck in the sand,"
Harper's, January 1991, p. 72.
[73] Paul Koring, "How Saddam became the enemy's enemy," The
Globe and Mail, March 2, 1991, p. D3.
[74] Noam Chomsky, "Nefarious aggression," Z Magazine, 3:10,
October 1990, p. 23.
[75] Holly Sklar, "Buried stories from media gulf," p. 60.
[76] The New York Times, "Reparations, without retribution,"
(editorial), March 4, 1991, p. A16.
[77] Philip Agee, "Producing the proper crisis," Z Magazine,
3:11, November 1990, p. 55.
[78] Noam Chomsky, "Nefarious aggression," p. 24.
[79] Keith Bradsher, "War damages and old debts could
exhaust Iraq's assets," The New York Times, March 1,
1991, p. A6.
[80] Noam Chomsky, "Nefarious aggression," p. 24.
[81] The Globe and Mail, "The world unites against Saddam
Hussein," (editorial), January 17, 1991, p. A16.
[82] William Thorsell, "The gulf war: For once, the good
guys got almost everything right," p. D6.
[83] The New York Times, "Beyond fury, cool calculation,"
(editorial), Feb. 27, 1991, p. A14.
[84] Reuters, "Hussein a Menace, Nixon Says," The Globe and
Mail, April 15, 1991, p.A9.
[85] Lloyd DeMause, "The Gulf War..." p. 303.
[86] Noam Chomsky, "The gulf crisis," Z Magazine, 4:2,
February 1991, p. 52.
[87] Colin MacKenzie, "Desertions, understaffed units eroded
the threat of Iraqi army," Globe and Mail, March 19,
1991, p. A1.
[88] Colin MacKenzie, "Desertions, understaffed units eroded
the threat of Iraqi army," p. A1.
[89] Colin MacKenzie, "Desertions, understaffed units eroded
the threat of Iraqi army," p. A1.
[90] R.W. Apple Jr., "Kuwait is retaken after 7 months as
allies destroy main Iraqi force," The New York Times,
February 28, 1991, pp. A1, A9. See also Michael
Gordon, "Outnumbered and outgunned, allied forces
outfox Hussein," The New York Times, February 28, 1991,
p. A9.
[91] See R.W. Apple Jr., "Air War is Pressed: Record Number
of Raids Flown Over Kuwait - Iraqis Burn Wells," The
New York Times, February 23, 1991, pp. A1, A8. Apple
did report on page 1 that "hundreds of canisters of
napalm, the gel that bursts into flame when it lands,
were dumped into deep, oil- filled trenches in front of
enemy lines to try to burn off the oil," and noted, "It
was the first known use of napalm in the Persian Gulf
war."
The elaboration was carried in the third-last
paragraph, on page 8. "The Associate Press quoted an
unidentified marine air officer as saying napalm was
being used against Iraqi troops, as it was against the
enemy in Vietnam. But Lieut. Comdr. John Tull, a
command spokesman, denied the report, asserting that
allied warplanes were dropping the gel only on Iraqi
defensive works."
Leaving aside Apple's assertion that napalm was only
used on the "enemy in Vietnam," and not North or South
Vietnamese citizens, it's clear that faced with
conflicting reports from AP and a military
spokesperson, he has sided with the latter. This is
evident from his front-page description of how napalm
was being used.
A separate story by Malcolm Browne that same day,
"Allies Are Said to Choose Napalm For Strikes on Iraqi
Fortifications," (p. A8) also presented the U.S.
military perspective. Accompanied by a photo of a
napalm bomb attached to a Marine Harrier jet, the story
provided a lengthy technical description of the origin
of napalm (invented at Harvard University during World
War 2), and its makeup (gasoline thickened with acids
and ignited on contact). The article then went on to
describe napalm as "a mainstay of armies and airforces
throughout the world." It said it was being used in
the gulf "by allied aircraft" which "are dropping
napalm canisters on ditches excavated by Iraqi forces
in Kuwait as tank obstacles... Dropping napalm appears
to be in an effort to burn off the oil before an
attack."
The final paragraph of the Browne story read: "The
napalm attacks may also be intended to inflict
casualties on front- line Iraqi troops and to depress
their morale."
[92] AP and Reuters wire services, "Rebels accuse Baghdad of
napalm massacre," The Globe and Mail, March 18, 1991 p.
A1.
[93] Chris Hedges, "Freed Kuwaities tell of Iraqi abuse
including some cases of torture," The New York Times,
February 28, 1991, pp. A1, A6.
[94] Dennis Bernstein and Larry Everest, citing M. Ismail,
the hospital's director, in "Health Catastrophe in
Iraq," Z Magazine, 4:6, June 1991, p. 27.
[95] Zoltan Grossman, "Ecocide in the Gulf?" Z Magazine,
4:3, March 1991, p. 26.
[96] Zoltan Grossman, "Ecocide in the Gulf?" p. 26; see also
Holly Sklar, "Buried stories from media Gulf," pp.
60-61.
[97] Edward Herman, "Gulfspeak II," Z Magazine, 4:3, March
1991, p. 14.
[98] Thomas Friedman, writing in The New York Times, January
20, 1991, cited in Edward Herman, "Gulfspeak II," p.
14.
[99] Morris Wolfe, "The wimp as a factor in the gulf war,"
The Globe and Mail, March 14, 1991, p. C1.
[100] Noam Chomsky, "Nefarious Aggression," p. 22.
[101] Metta Spencer, "Prisoners..." p. 5.
[102] Noam Chomsky, "Nefarious Aggression," pp. 22-23.
Chomsky also notes that: "Rejection of diplomacy was
explicit from the outset. New York Times chief
diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman (in effect,
the State Department voice at the Times) attributed
the Administration's rejection of 'a diplomatic track'
to its concern that negotiations might 'defuse the
crisis' at the cost of 'a few token gains in Kuwait'
for the Iraqi dictator, perhaps 'a Kuwaiti island or
minor border adjustments' (August 22). Anything short
of capitulation to U.S. force is unacceptable,
whatever the consequences." Noam Chomsky, "Oppose the
war: the gulf crisis," Z Magazine, 4:2, February 1991,
p. 50.
[103] Terence Hunt, (AP) "U.S. rejects peace plan; War
effort to continue," The News-Journal, Daytona Beach
Fla., Feb. 22, 1991, p. 1.
[104] The New York Times reported that although they were
"initially suspicious" of the Soviets, Bush and Co.
"have come to see [Gorbachev's] initiative more as an
attempt to juggle several competing interests than
[as] a sinister plot." The Soviet strategy, while
falling short of "a Cold War scheme," was "to enhance
Moscow's status in the Arab world, position [their]
country for a role in the postwar gulf settlement and
demonstrate to Soviet hard-liners that Kremlin foreign
policy has not become an extension of American foreign
policy." Thomas Friedman, "No subterfuge is perceived
behind Soviet peace moves," The New York Times,
February 23, 1991, p. A5.
[105] Michael Gordon, "The seven-day strategy: Bush
timetable seeks to humble Hussein while diminishing
army's fighting ability," The New York Times, Feb. 23,
1991, p. A1.
[106] (From wire services) "Saddam's time running out as
Bush orders noon pullout," The News-Journal, Daytona
Beach, Fla, February 23, 1991, p. A1.
[107] William Thorsell, "The gulf war: For once, the good
guys got almost everything right," p. D6.
[108] Jim Nunn, (host) Media File, CBC radio, January 26,
1991.
[109] Cf. Jim Winter, "Media broom sweeps clean," The
Toronto Star, January 24, 1991, p. A27; Jim Winter,
"Gulf war distracting voters from other woes," The
Windsor Star, January 29, 1991, p. A7.
[110] Cf. Klaus Pohl, "Few facts and fewer scruples," The
Globe and Mail, January 22, 1991, p. A15; Stan
Cunningham, "War causing media to take hard look at
itself," The Windsor Star, January 25, 1991, p. A7.
[111] This follows one of the tenets of the media propaganda
model devised by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in:
Manufacturing Consent: A Political Economy of the Mass
Media, Pantheon, N.Y., 1988.
[112] Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, (Eds.),
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International
Publishers, N.Y., 1971, p. 263.
[113] C.P. Otero (Ed), Noam Chomsky's Radical Priorities,
Black Rose Books, Montreal, 2nd Ed., 1981, pp.
299-300.
[114] Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 135.
[115] Herman and Chomsky, p. 299.
[116] Richard Ericson, Pat Baranek, Janet Chan, Visualizing
Deviance: A Study of News Organization, University of
Toronto Press, Toronto, 1987, p. 351.
[117] These comments are based primarily on the excellent
work by Ericson, et al., cited above, but also on the
sociology of news literature by authors such as Edward
J. Epstein, David Altheide, Gaye Tuchman, Herbert
Gans, the Glasgow University Media Group, Todd Gitlin,
and others, as well as personal observations as a
media source over the past decade.
[118] On the pretext of objectivity, cf. Michael Schudson,
Discovering The News, Basic, N.Y., 1978, and W. Lance
Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, Longman,
N.Y., 2nd Edition, 1988.
[119] Marc Cooper and Lawrence Soley, "All the Right
Sources," Mother Jones, February/March 1990, pp. 20ff.
[120] Leon Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization
and Politics of Newsmaking, D.C. Heath, Lexington
Mass., 1973.
[121] John Miller, "Rethinking old Methods," Content
magazine, September/October 1990, pp. 24ff.
[122] Ericson, et al., p.17.
[123] These examples are my own. For a general discussion
of common sense, cf. Ericson, et al., p.17; also
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, Basic Books, N.Y.,
1983, p. 93.
[124] Stuart Hall, "Culture, the Media and the 'Ideological
Effect,'" in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet
Woollacott, Mass Communication and Society, Sage,
London, 1979, pp. 343-344.
[125] Ericson, et al., p. 346.
[126] Ericson, et al., p.363.
[127] Evidently this moniker dates back to a Newsweek cover
story in 1987, titled, "Fighting the 'Wimp Factor."
Bush was "apoplectic," snubbing Newsweek for almost a
year, until their representatives finally met with him
to negotiate a truce. Bush fumed for 45 minutes. "He
said that he was personally offended and that his
family had been hurt, his daughter had cried...."
Morris Wolfe, "The wimp as a factor in the gulf war,"
The Globe and Mail, March 14, 1991, p. C1.
[128] Maureen Dowd, "War introduces nation to a tougher
Bush," p. A1.
[129] Robin Toner, "Bush's luck in war confers an aura of
invincibility in '92," The New York Times, February
27, 1991, p. A1.
[130] Tom Riddell, "The gulf war and the U.S. economy," Z
Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, pp. 63-64.
[131] Tom Riddell, "The gulf war and the U.S. economy," pp.
65-66. These figures will be disputed. The Pentagon
predicted, for example, that the war would cost from
$58 to $77 billion for the fiscal year starting Oct.
1, 1990. Thus, the Bush Administration asked Congress
for $15 billion, "plus the use of all $51 billion"
pledged in aid from other countries, on February 22.
This differs considerably from Riddell's figure of
$41.5 billion pledged. (AP),"Pentagon predicts war to
cost up to $77 billion this year," The News-Journal,
(Daytona) February 22, 1991, p. 16A.
[132] Steve Lohr, "U.S. Corporations win Kuwait rebuilding
jobs," The New York Times, February 28, 1991, p. A11.
[133] Steve Lohr, "U.S. Corporations..." p. A11.
[134] Steve Lohr, "U.S. Corporations..." p. A11.
[135] Cited in Parker Payson, "Figure it out," The
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 1991,
p. 55.
[136] "Pentagon predicts war to cost up to $77 billion this
year," p. 16A.
[137] Chomsky, "'What we say goes..." p.58.
[138] Associated Press, "U.S. tops in supplying Third World
weaponry," The Toronto Star, August 12, 1991, p. A3.
[139] Colin Gordon, "Thicker Than Oil," Z Magazine, 4:4,
April 1991, p. 30.
[140] Edward Herman, "War's Bright Future," Z Magazine, 4:5,
May 1991, p. 10.
[141] That is, if U.S. administrations had not supported
Saddam Hussein (before) or if Bush had supported the
Kurdish resistance (after), then the emergence of a
democratic system in Iraq might have been more likely
to occur. For a detailed analysis, see Noam Chomsky,
"What we say goes: the Middle East in the new world
order," Z Magazine, 4:5, May 1991, pp. 49-64.
[142] Stuart Hall, "Culture, the Media..." pp. 332-333.
[143] Stuart Hall, "Culture, the Media..." p. 344.
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