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http://www.independent.org/tii/content/events/f_macarth.html
The Independent Policy Forum
Transcripts
Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War:
How Government Can Mold Public Opinion
October 7, 1993
Sheraton Palace Hotel, San Francisco
John R. MacArthur
Publisher, Harper's Magazine
Author, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the
Gulf War
Introduction
David Theroux
President, The Independent Institute:
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is David
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Institute, and I am delighted to welcome you to our
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Your packet should have an Independent Briefing on the
book.
Our program today could not be more timely. Despite
this week's congressional clamor for withdrawal, an
increasingly bloody, escalating intervention in
Somalia is showing that the use of military
intervention by the Clinton administration, like the
Bush administration before it, is likely to continue
to be a common feature of American foreign policy.
Today, we have learned that an additional 5,000 plus
troops with heavy weapons will now be sent to Somalia
for "non-military purposes." But will the Clinton
administration like the Bush administration allow the
military to keep American journalists from doing their
jobs if the shooting starts and American forces take
increased casualties? Will the Clinton administration
seek to limit the role of the press as was done in the
Gulf War to that of glorified government stenographers
should its interventions turn bloody, as has already
happened with the Somalia expedition?
Furthermore, what happens when government goes
unchallenged, and when questions regarding present and
proposed domestic and international policies go
unasked? To understand how government officials may
seek to shift and control public opinion, our speaker
today has found understanding the precedents set
during the war against Saddam Hussein to be most
insightful.
In his presentation, our speaker will draw upon his
widely-acclaimed book, Second Front: Censorship and
Propaganda in the Gulf War, to scrutinize the
government's campaign to tightly control the American
media during Operation Desert Storm, policies that can
be traced through decades of press-government
relations, including that developed in the military
operations in Grenada and Panama.
In his talk, our speaker will detail behind-the-scenes
activities during Operation Desert Storm by the U.S.
and Kuwaiti governments as well as the media's being
co-opted while its rights to observe, question, and
report were heavily restricted far beyond any needs to
protect American lives. As a result, from Left to
Right, there resulted a virtual and complete cave-in
by the media over the events, politics, and simple
facts during the Gulf Crisis. For example, as reported
in September's issue of Washington Monthly, within
minutes after a Norman Schwarzkopf Gulf War briefing
in which the General showed the press an Air Force
film that he said depicted the destruction of seven
Iraqi Scud missiles, he was told that the CIA believed
that they were oil tanker trucks, not Scuds. The
General never corrected the record, and in a House
Armed Services committee report recently released, it
states "a postwar review of photographs cannot produce
even a single confirmed kill of a Scud missile."
In a similar vein, where the General claimed that Iraq
had 623,000 soldiers in the Kuwaiti theater, postwar
Army estimates put Iraqi strength at roughly 300,000,
and the House committee report puts the figure at
183,000. The Allies, meanwhile, had a total of 700,000
troops.
It has been said that truth is the first casualty of
war, and the history of war-making certainly bears
this out. History has indeed been largely written by
the victors, and anyone familiar with the Bayeux
Tapestry of William the Conqueror knows the lengths to
which a State will go to justify war atrocities.. And
in the American experience, the Spanish-American War,
World Wars I and II, and the wars in Korea and Vietnam
all depended upon extensive government propaganda
campaigns. The World War I journalist Randolph Bourne
correctly stated that "War is the Health of the
State," and it is to counter this total power that a
free, independent, non-governmental press is so
crucial.
Our speaker today could not be better qualified or
more incisive in addressing the pressing civil
liberties questions we face. In addition, he was
strongly influenced by the late Walter Karp, whose
work on journalism and war has scarcely been equaled.
Rick MacArthur is in the investigative and
muck-racking journalistic tradition of both H. L.
Mencken and I. F. Stone.
He is the publisher of Harper's Magazine. His book,
Second Front, was selected by The New York Times Book
Review Committee as "One of the Notable Books of the
Year."
Before joining Harper's, Mr. MacArthur was assistant
foreign editor for United Press International, and he
has been a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, Bergen
Record, Washington Star, and The Wall Street Journal.
In 1986, Mr. MacArthur co-founded Article 19, the
International Centre on Censorship, which is based in
London.
Mr. MacArthur holds a bachelor's degree in history
from Columbia University, and he is a fellow at the
New York Institute for the Humanities and a director
of the Author's Guild and the Committee to Protect
Journalists.
I am very pleased to introduce him now to speak on
"Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War: How
Government Can Mold Public Opinion," after which he
will be happy to answer your questions. May I present
Rick MacArthur.
Presentation by John R. MacArthur:
I hope none of you think I am a humorless left-wing
media critic, but I come out of a tradition of
reporting which is probably fast disappearing, I am
afraid. One of my mentors at United Press
International was a very odd survivor of the "Beat
Generation" named Lucian Carr. One day I was working
on the foreign desk -- cables desk as we called it at
UPI -- and I had sent over a story with a lead
paragraph that Carr decided was not sufficient to
excite the interest of what we called "telegraph
editors" at newspapers around the country. Carr sort
of ambled over to the cables desk and he said,
"Gentlemen, make me cry or make me horny." That was
the sort of world I grew up in, a newspaper business
that didn't take itself nearly as seriously as it
takes itself now; and I would argue, it was a much
better, livelier business than it has become.
To begin, to back up the argument in my book, Second
Front, I always prefer a literary reference to a
historical one -- that is when I can get away with it.
During the summer vacation, and gratefully overcoming
my phobia about Henry James, I had the good fortune to
discover two terrifically useful quotations in one
novel, The Portrait of a Lady, that bear directly on
those arguments I make in Second Front. In fact, if I
had known about them two years ago I would have used
them in the book.
The first quotation deals with the attitude of
Americans toward war, certainly in the nineteenth
century, but, I believe, in some ways it is still our
basic attitude. Bear with me if you know the story of
The Portrait of a Lady. James' heroine, the young,
attractive and intelligent Isabel Archer has been
pursued, by among other men, a certain Casper
Goodwood, a Massachusetts textile heir of energy and
literal mindedness -- in short, a member of the class
that I like to refer to as the "working rich." James
describes him this way, "It always struck people who
knew him that he might do greater things than carry on
a cotton factory. There was nothing cottony about
Casper Goodwood. And his friends took him for granted
that he would not always content himself with that. He
had once said to Isabel that if the United States were
not such a confoundedly peaceful nation, he would find
his proper place in the Army."
In the Gulf War story, George Bush plays a version of
Casper Goodwood, the son of the New England political
and business aristocracy, desperate to prove himself
in war, trying to overcome the confoundedly peaceful
tendencies of his fellow citizens, which stand in the
way of his enormous ambition.
Another character in the novel is Isabel's friend,
Henrietta Stackpole. Henrietta is as straight-forward
and energetic as Goodwood, but her trade is journalism
and she is constantly trying to tell Isabel the truth,
which is the very bad news that the man Isabel
eventually marries is a selfish, narrow-minded prig.
Now regarding the husband's poor opinion of her, of
Henrietta, James quotes Henrietta this way, "I don't
know and I don't care. He is perfectly welcome not to
like me. I don't want everyone to like me. I should
think less of myself if some people did."
A journalist can't hope to do much good unless he gets
hated a good deal. That's the way he knows his work
goes on. Henrietta, who works for The New York
Interviewer speaks in the honest journalist idiom
displayed in my book by Dan Rather, who denounces the
new era of what he calls "suck-up journalism." He
describes to me how he's become an alien in a world in
which his boss is urgent to become more likable -- not
hated, but more likable. Rather can remember the day
not so long ago when reporters were rewarded for being
more like Henrietta Stackpole.
Now, do these nineteenth century assumptions about
America, fundamentally peaceful and protected from the
Casper Goodwoods by a fiercely independent and
rambunctious press, still apply in the present day?
Sadly they don't.
On the one hand, in the Gulf War story we have a
president of great energy and ambition who drags his
reluctant countrymen into war through a carefully
orchestrated and largely fraudulent public relations
campaign. Standing between Bush and his ambition there
should have been a whole army of Henrietta Stackpoles
asking unpleasant and probing questions. In 1881 it
could be assumed that most reporters and publishers
would have generally agreed with Henrietta's
assessment of the journalist destiny to be hated. But
what Bush encountered in the late twentieth century
instead was a group of tame and timid press agents
incapable, or unwilling for the most part, of doing
even the most basic police reporting. Not to mention
asking probing and intelligent questions about foreign
policy, foreign countries, war and peace, etc., etc.
Worse still, Bush found among the media a cadre of
"journalists" who did their best to perpetrate the
propaganda that proved successful in driving this
country into the Gulf War.
Again, I assume that most of you have not read my
book. I will summarize what I think are the three
great frauds produced by the White House with the
cooperation, eager or passive depending on your point
of view, of the U.S. media.
First, we have the campaign to prove that Saddam
Hussein was the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler rather
than what he is, which is a violent Arab dictator of
the sort the United States frequently likes to back. A
subset of this campaign was to paint the Kuwaitis as a
freedom-loving people moving inexorably toward
democracy. This was done with very sophisticated
maneuvering, costing a lot of money, namely with
something called Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK),
which of course implies that American citizens are
rallying to the Kuwaiti cause from all over the
country. Citizens for a Free Kuwait forms itself about
a week after Saddam invades Kuwait and they hire Hill
& Knowlton, the public relations firm, and ultimately
pays it $11 million to create what was one of the most
brilliantly orchestrated public relations campaigns in
history. It really should go down in the record books,
and I am hoping that someone will do a scholarly book
on it someday.
I went to visit Citizens for a Free Kuwait, or what
was left of it, a few months after the Gulf War ended
when I was doing research on my book. I went to see a
Mr. Ibrahim, who was the titular head of CFK. The
first time I realized something fishy was going on
when he pulled out a stack of atrocity photographs. I
went through them and thought this looks pretty awful
-- people with odd pieces of metal jammed into their
bodies in various places.
It looked quite horrible, but the photographs were a
little out of focus. I went through them a second time
and I realized that they were mannequins. They had
literally dressed up mannequins as torture victims!
This is not to say that Saddam did not kill Kuwaitis
and did not torture Kuwaitis but these fraudulent
photographs became the stock and trade of the Hill &
Knowlton campaign.
Now, the absolute piéce de resistance of this
propaganda campaign, as you may have heard, was the
baby-incubator atrocity. In August, the word started
coming out of Kuwait from anonymous sources who were
interviewed by reporters, who, as I said, did not do
the most fundamental police reporting -- like asking
for last names, addresses, ages, occupations, etc.,
etc., -- saying that Iraqi soldiers were pulling
babies out of incubators and killing them that way in
Kuwaiti hospitals.
Hill & Knowlton is very well connected on Capitol Hill
and at the White House. The senior account people on
the Kuwaiti account included Craig Fuller, Bush's
former chief of staff when Bush was Vice President,
and various other mucky mucks who know how to make
things happen on Capitol Hill. They set up a hearing
with the Congressional Human Rights caucus, chaired by
Tom Lantos, the Bay Area congressman, and John Edward
Porter of Illinois, in which they were going to expose
Iraqi atrocities for the benefit of the caucus and the
American people.
Anyway, there was an incredible conflict of interest
between the caucus and Hill & Knowlton, the most
important aspect of which was that the Congressional
Human Rights Foundation, which was a fund-raising arm
of the caucus, had its offices, rent-free, in the Hill
& Knowlton headquarters. The Hill & Knowlton
executives were also representing as clients habitual
human rights violators like Turkey, Indonesia and
China. You might ask yourself why Lantos and Porter
were allowing this arrangement. In any event, the star
of the hearing was a young 15 year-old girl named
Nayirah -- no last name, no address, no occupation --
who said that she had volunteered at Kuwaiti hospitals
and had seen the babies pulled from incubators and
left to die on the cold floor.
Now, to this day, I cannot tell you whether or not
this story, which turned out to be utterly fake, was
manufactured by historically-astute public relations
executives in collaboration with the Kuwaitis, who had
read World War I history and had learned how
successful the German atrocities against Belgian
babies and nuns had been in getting public opinion on
the side of the allies and getting the United States
into that war.
Nobody at the hearing, no reporter said, "Nayirah,
that is a terrible story; I am on the verge of tears.
But what did you do after you put the babies on the
floor to die? Did you call for help, did you try to
pick one up, what happened then?"
The most fundamental and most elementary questions
that a reporter is supposed to ask were not asked.
Niyarah was a fantastic propaganda success. Hill &
Knowlton made a brilliant little video news release
out of it, which they beamed all over the world. It
was on NBC Nightly News and millions and millions of
people saw this. My brother saw Niyarah testify, and
it brought him to tears. That was the beginning of the
campaign. The campaign had begun to "get legs" as we
say in the public relations and news business.
Then they went to the United Nations and they did the
same thing at the Security Council. There was a
certain Dr. Behbehani, who you may remember testified
that he was a surgeon who had personally seen the
burial of 40 babies pulled from incubators.
It turns out that Dr. Behbehani was a dentist, not a
surgeon; and he admitted after the war that he had
lied, he made the whole thing up! But again, it was
grist for the public relations mill, it was
terrifically successful. Every time you put this stuff
on camera -- and they staged it all very, very
successfully -- you make a video news release out of
it and WZZZ in San Antonio can just pop it into the
console and make it part of their evening news. It's
got a longer life than just the day of the hearing or
the day of the security counsel hearing. It gets used
again and again and again as filler for tonight's
roundup on Saddam-Hitler, Iraqi atrocities.
I did a little math and found out that the polls
showed a country pretty much divided 50-50 on
sanctions versus hostilities back in December 1990 and
January 1991. But when the vote was finally taken in
the Senate, you may recall, it passed by five votes
and in favor of war. Six Senators cited the
baby-incubator atrocity as a principal reason -- sort
of a final, compelling reason to vote for the
resolution over their initial or instinctive
reluctance to go to war. Several others who voted for
the resolution said they thought Iraqi atrocities in
general were a good reason to go to war. As you may
know, Niyarah was not only a liar, but she was the
daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United
States. That is the story I revealed in The New York
Times in January of 1992 on the op-ed page.
So, you have the country going to war, essentially, I
believe, over human rights, not over oil, not over
realpolitik, not over America's destiny to police the
world, but really over human rights. This is what
swung the balance. That a good part of the human
rights atrocities story was fake suggests that we were
mislead, conned, whatever you want to say.
The second great fraud that I think took place during
the Gulf War build-up was, and this is a little more
obscure, the premise for sending troops in, in the
first place.
You remember that Bush sent troops in order to defend
Saudi Arabia against a possible invasion from Kuwait
by the Iraqis. But there were Soviet satellite
photographs available of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia taken
on September 11 and 13 1990. Those photographs showed
very clearly the American troop concentration on the
Saudi side of the border. They showed no Iraqi troop
concentrations on the Kuwaiti side of the border,
nothing.
Several news organizations had access to these
photographs, including Newsweek, ABC and The Chicago
Tribune. Sam Donaldson personally looked at them and
thought about going with them. But they all spiked the
story because they were too scared to publish a story
that contradicted what the government was saying,
which was essentially that there was a huge number of
Iraqi soldiers poised or prepared to invade Saudi
Arabia, which of course was the premise for sending
the troops.
In January, just before the Senate debate on the war
resolution, The St. Petersburg Times finally published
the photographs. The only newspaper in the country to
publish these was in St. Petersburg, Florida, so the
wire services didn't pick it up and television didn't
pick it up. (If you lived in St. Petersburg, you were
the best informed American on the subject of Iraq's
threat to Saudi Arabia.)
After the famous April Glaspie gaff, she was called
home. Remember what she did? She said to Saddam that
the United States takes no position in border disputes
between Arab countries or between Iraq and Kuwait,
which some people think encouraged Saddam to invade.
In April, a reporter caught her on the fly walking
down the street and he asked, "How did you manage to
screw up so badly, April?" She said, "We didn't think
he'd take the whole thing."
I strongly believe that the invasion threat was fake.
Even Schwarzkopf in his autobiography skirts the
question. He's very careful because, I think, he's
afraid that evidence may come out that the invasion
threat wasn't what we had said it was. If you read his
autobiography, he says, even if the Iraqis weren't
intending to invade Saudi Arabia, it was a good thing
to go after them.
The third canard is the nuclear threat. If you recall,
there was a great deal said about Saddam's nuclear
capability and quite a bit of hysterical posturing on
that subject. I found out from a very, very reliable
government source -- and it's public, if you want to
see it -- that the estimates on Saddam's potential for
building a crude atomic bomb that he could conceivably
use, range from two weeks to fifteen years. If you put
together all the expert opinion on it. I've thought
since I've started looking into this, the economic
embargo made it impossible for him to complete work on
the bomb, even if he was aggressively trying to do it
and even if he had the capability.
The second factor that people didn't discuss of course
was Seymour Hersh's revelation that the Israelis have
300 nuclear warheads and are perfectly prepared to use
them if necessary. During the war in 1974 with Egypt,
Golda Meir actually prepared the military for a
nuclear strike on Egypt. You have to remember that the
Israelis had already taken out a nuclear reactor in
Baghdad in 1981, so the idea that the world was going
to sit by and let Saddam build a bomb and use it is
not only tenuous, but with a full blown economic
blockade on Iraq, it doesn't seem very plausible that
he could complete the program even under, as I said,
less than optimal circumstances. But this was again
very, very effective because people said, "Well, even
if this is the case and that is the case, and Bush is
really trying to do this over oil or some other
reason, it's a good thing to destroy his nuclear
program." I suppose it is still a fairly good
argument.
Were we conned into the war? I really do feel we were.
Remember how close that Senate vote was? At least we
could have hoped for a better account of the battle
such as it was. My editor, Lewis Lapham, at Harper's
calls it "the suppression of a mob." That's really a
better description of the Gulf War.
But the censorship was so extraordinary and the media
was so passive in the face of it that, of course, we
got a terrible view of what the war actually looked
like and what occurred during the war.
In his introduction, David Theroux referred to one
example: Schwarzkopf and the mobile Scud-launchers.
The story was first broken by Mark Crispen Miller, on
the op-ed page of The New York Times last year, that
Schwarzkopf had been briefed before he went on
television, and went ahead anyway with the
misinformation about the alleged Scud hits. This issue
incidentally came up in the lawsuit against the
government's campaign of censorship, which Harper's
Magazine participated in, led by The Nation. We
couldn't get any major media companies to join the law
suit. In my book, I interview people like Ben Bradlee
and Katherine Graham of The Washington Post who show a
marked indifference to the whole thing. You have to
understand that if Ben Bradlee, or especially
Katherine Graham, doesn't care enough to do anything
about it, nothing is going to get done. It's just not
going to get done. The institutional opposition is
just not going to happen. I could go into great detail
about how the media bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.,
colluded in their own demise but it's a very, very sad
and pathetic story.
What is a poor citizen do, given that you've got
ambitious politicians who want to put one over on you,
and you've got reporters who don't want to do anything
about it, don't want to ask questions, don't know how
to do basic reporting anymore? All I can advise you to
do is to do your own reporting and reading.
I don't want to give you a sense of hopelessness
because it's not hopeless. The best media critics were
A. J. Liebling, H. L. Mencken and Walter Karp -- and I
recommend all their books to you and all their
articles. But what about the journalists themselves,
what about the reporters themselves? As Rather had
said, our kind of reporter, the kind of reporter I
think of myself as being and he fantasizes he once was
a tough guy reporter, afraid of no one, ready to
challenge power at every step -- is virtually extinct.
You know the sort of reporter who really likes to put
a politician's feet to the fire, who enjoys it, who
has a kind of a mean streak.
I am going to speak to the University of California
Graduate School of Journalism tonight, and I am going
to ask the students, "How many of you really feel that
you have the stomach for this, the sort of mean
streak, or that you get the joy out of getting a
politician angry, that is required to do good
journalism?"
But the situation just seems to get worse and worse. I
don't know if any of you noticed, but Harper's, in
conjunction with Nightline, broke a story in August
about a document that seemed to show that George Bush
strafed lifeboats in World War II. This is a document
that was floating around in the media before the
election while Bush is bashing Clinton's draft-dodging
and trumpeting his own wartime achievements and no one
would publish it. Newsweek wouldn't publish it, U.S.
News & World Report wouldn't publish it. They wouldn't
even ask Bush for comment on it.
Harper's published it in the September issue, but
believe me, we were not congratulated by our
colleagues. In fact, I went on a couple of radio shows
with the media critic of Newsweek, Jonathan Alter.
Jonathan, who was supposed to be a media critic spent
a good ten minutes explaining why the document was
insignificant. So that at the end of five minutes of
this explication, I said, isn't this great to have the
media critic for Newsweek magazinedoing George Bush's
explaining for him.
That is precisely what was going on during the Gulf
War, during the build-up and during the Gulf War.
Ninety-five percent of the reporters were doing their
damnedest to interpret or to help explicate the
government's version of the war. That is what
journalists do now. It is not even stenography as
David Theroux described it. It's worse than
stenography now, it's extra public relations help.
Through the Freedom of Information Act request I was
able to get this wonderful conversation between Pete
Williams, the chief Pentagon spokesman and his
underlings in Dhahran, where he actually says, "Look
guys, you may get some gripes from the reporters who
feel unhappy about being confined in pools and not
getting to the action and so on, but, to tell you the
truth, there's a big portion of them that are just
doing this for show, they really want to help." "Sort
of tweak it up a little bit," is the way Williams put
it.
We're now in a situation where you've got powerful
newspaper executives like Al Neuharth, the former
chairman of the Gannett chain making idiotic
statements like, "There are no more secrets in the
world." From the highest mountain to the lowest
valley. Connie Chung, I guess, who's much more likable
than Dan Rather, and who is now his co-anchor. Pete
Williams is now a reporter -- the guy who lied again
and again during the Gulf War and lied directly to me.
I can honestly call him a liar and never lose a liable
suit. He is now a reporter for NBC. Bob Woodward, the
hero of Watergate, sits on stories. One of the best
stories of the pre-Gulf War period was the revelation
which we received in his book after the Gulf War that
Colin Powell opposed -- alone in the administration --
military action and a military solution in the Gulf
War. I think that's something that would have formed
the debate before the war. But he sat on the story and
it was left to Bob Edwards, our friend on Morning
Edition to say, "Gee, isn't that a little odd, I mean
in Watergate you broke stories as the story was
unfolding." Woodward gave some half-assed response
about, "Well, it wasn't like any great crime was being
committed."
What all this does is to discourage reporters or young
people going into journalism to try to do what I think
is the right thing, which is to get in trouble, make
trouble and make people mad at them on behalf of the
public. And of course, get the public angry from time
to time.
But I am afraid that if you polled most journalism
students today, you'd find that a good number of them
are hoping to become Sam Donaldson, who sat on the
satellite photographs because he was too scared to go
with them, or Diane Sawyer, who was an assistant press
agent for Nixon -- does anybody know that she followed
Nixon into exile for 2 years? She continued working
for him after Watergate -- rather than Seymour Hersh,
who is one of my heroes, and a real nasty
son-of-a-bitch who just broke a very good story in The
New Yorker. Or they want to be George Stephanopolis or
they even want to be a Hill & Knowlton p.r. executive
because that's where the action is today, that's where
the rewards are.
Like Henrietta Stackpole, I am dedicated to the notion
that it is a great thing to be hated, or at least, I
accept it as part of the territory of being a serious
reporter. And, I think, what could be better than to
be hated by Frank Lankowitz and Robert Gray of Hill &
Knowlton or, for that matter by George Bush or Robert
Stinnet, who is outraged that I am speaking here
today? Stinnet, of course, was Bush's wartime
biographer, and he is the guy who left the strafing
report out of the biography.
But what is a little disturbing is to be hated by my
putative colleagues in the press. And I am hated by
them because I go around attacking them and telling
them that they are slobs and lazy and tools of the
establishment and hand-maidens to political power. And
they hate me for it. But it is getting to the point
that things are so polarized I really don't have any
choice but to do this. To go around saying that
politicians are lying to you and you have got to be
aware, without pointing out that one of our big
problems is that reporters themselves are helping
amplify the lies, I would not be giving you the whole
story, and that is what I am supposed to do as a
journalist and a publisher.
Nowadays the courtiers in the press want to be invited
to parties at the White House or Jack Kent Cook's box
at RFK Stadium. They want to be loved, and this is
paradoxical: they want to be loved by the politicians
and by the masses, by the general public. They want
celebrity status and they want access to the halls of
power. But ultimately, of course, as Jefferson said,
and I am paraphrasing, "At some point in one's life,
one has to choose between the interests of the many
and the interests of the few." This balancing act is
very dangerous for reporters and editorial people
because, at a certain point, if you choose the
interests of a few too often and it gets exposed, it
can bring you down -- at least that's my hope.
The only way your interest -- the public interest --
is going to be represented in the media is if you get
wise to what is going on and you let the media know
that you are dissatisfied. It takes I think $100
million to start a daily newspaper, and good luck
trying to do so. But there has got to be some way that
you get your message across that you are not happy,
that you are not satisfied with the situation. That's
the only hope.
Question: Who really supports the McNeil-Lehrer
Newshour? Who pays for it?
MacArthur: AT&T is the principal underwriter, along
with PBS. I don't think the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour is
any worse than CNN or any other news organization.
What McNeil-Lehrer is and what most news organizations
are these days are basically passive institutions.
Walter Karp's great insight, that it is not an
ideological conspiracy by the media or by reporters to
keep you in the dark, it is a passive reaction, a sort
of folding inward in the face of political power.
The way the game is played in Washington and New York
is if the White House says or the congressional
leadership says, "This is news," it becomes news. .
Remember Bush decided that Somalia was news because he
was in a bad mood about the likelihood of losing and
he wanted to send a Christmas card to the American
people. So, it became news. Government sets the news
agenda, not Robin McNeil and Jim Lehrer and not AT&T
and not PBS. I am not unloading on the McNeil-Lehrer
Newshour, they are no worse than anybody else.
Question: If the questions are not being asked, then
isn't the information never going to get out to the
public?
MacArthur: As I said, the reward system is such that
you don't get rewarded for asking those questions. You
get punished, you get criticized, you get insulted.
You start asking and McNeil-Lehrer specializes in
putting institutional government spokesman on and
newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington
Post or news organizations like McNeil-Lehrer are very
dependent on their relationships with government. They
need guests for their shows; they need leaks to make
it look like they are reporting the news and so on and
so forth.
If Robin McNeil suddenly gets mean and asks that
question, the White House or whoever sent the
spokesman is going to say. "We are not going to send
him next time, Robin. We are not going to invite you
to the Christmas party and we are not going to invite
you to dinner with the Under-Secretary of State and
you are going to get frozen out, if you do that too
often.
I believe that the power of corporations is
exaggerated in this country. I really do go against
all of my left-wing friends and colleagues on this
one. The real power in this country is with elected
politicians and bureaucrats. And it is not bribery or
influence from AT&T, it is the government that sets
the news agenda. It is a reward system and unless you
have owners, and there is really no alternative to
private enterprise in the media, it is up to the
owners to set a tone for the reporters where they are
rewarded for asking the tough questions. The media
today are not.
Question: Aren't corporations really responsible for
electing politicians and hence the policies and
misinformation that results?
MacArthur: No, I think it is a misconception that
corporations bribe politicians. What happens is
politicians shake down corporations. It is a shakedown
operation ,and it is too easy, and we get into trouble
when we say this because it is tempting to say that
politics is ruled by money. No, the country is ruled
by politicians and they shake down whomever they can
shake down for money to advance their causes and
maintain control. Look, you have got to read Walter
Karp, we are going to publish Indispensable Enemies.
You've got to read it. Harper's is going to reissue
it. You should all buy a copy.
Question: With regards to Bob Simon, while Rather was
crying crocodile tears about CBS not joining the
nations and saying how terrible it was that everybody
was kowtowing to Bush, I don't exactly know if it
happened when he said the photographs were available,
but Simon drove out past the American lines to find
the enemy. I believe that it took him eight hours.
That story was covered prominently, his capture and
such. And in that respect, weren't the journalists
there responsible for not bringing up the point that
it took eight hours to find the enemy, rather than the
fact that he was captured by the Iraqi "baby-killers"?
MacArthur: That is a very astute point because I limit
my comments about Bob Simon by saying, "Hurray for Bob
Simon." He is one of the only reporters who tried to
break away from the pool system and the censorship
system to go out and do some independent reporting,
and he paid for it.
What is also terrible is that his colleagues -- while
they did publicize his capture -- and didn't ask the
question that you are asking, because it is true. I
interviewed Simon. He went to the border and there was
nobody there except the Saudi border guard all by
himself and he asked, "Have you seen any Iraqis?" and
the guard said, "No. I haven't seen anybody, you want
to go look?" I mean it is all sand, there is no fence.
So they say. "What the hell," and they drove into the
desert looking for Iraqis. In the distance they see
one jeep with three Iraqis in it and they have got
guns and they arrest them. But he doesn't see anything
along the border anywhere that suggests an invading
army is encamped.
Another insidious thing that happened is that any
reporters who tried to play ball with the government,
they tried to get favors in exchange for operating
with the government and the military were critical of
Simon for not behaving like a good Boy Scout. Simon
cheated. That is another thing I urge reporters to do
is to buy and cheat in the name of truth. You know he
would put on combat fatigues and he and his cameramen
impersonated soldiers, which got them past checkpoints
and got them out into the field. A lot of reporters
said, "Oh, that is terrible; they cheated." It is
another world than the one that I came up in and I am
only 37 years-old. Things have really changed.
Question: Is it possible that the reason the press
really didn't cover the Gulf War adequately is because
the feeling of the country at the time is that we
didn't want another Vietnam, we wanted to feel good
about this war, we wanted to win this war?
MacArthur: Yes. Once the war had begun, up to that
point people were deeply ambivalent. Remember it was
50-50 after an enormous, expensive an very
sophisticated public relations campaign. The country
was still pretty much divided on sanctions versus war
on January 11 when the Senate debate began. It was
still pretty much divided in the polls. And it was a
tribute to our confoundedly peaceful instincts that
Casper Goodwood is complaining about that in the face
of this onslaught, half the people were still
skeptical about the war option. Does that answer your
question?
Question: Do you know where the $11 million that was
raised rather quickly for the advertising of the Hill
& Knowlton public relations budget came from?
MacArthur: It was all Kuwaiti government money.
Citizens for a Free Kuwait was a complete fraud. I
counted the amount of money. I believe American
citizens contributed about $312, some poor gullible
souls. The Kuwaiti government contributed about $11
million. It was all fake.
Question: Why didn't the Kuwaiti Army or defenses put
up a battle when they were invaded?
MacArthur: I am not an expert on Kuwaiti culture. I
tried to learn as much about the Kuwaitis as I could
but they are not noted as fighters. They are noted as
pearl divers and that is how they built their fortune
in the eighteenth century. One of the great ironies of
Kuwaiti history is that in the mid-1930s, when Iraq
was ruled by a nationalist king who wanted the British
out, the Kuwaitis begged for a merger with Iraq, which
the British could not permit because of their
divide-and-rule policy. Suddenly the king of Iraq died
in a car accident and there were actually pro-union
riots in Kuwait, but then oil was discovered and the
Kuwaitis discovered they didn't need Iraq. I think the
Kuwaitis have a real claim to sovereignty in a sense
that it is fashionable and cynical to say, "Well, all
these borders were drawn by the British in a tent,"
but there is a sort of Kuwaiti organism that exists
from the 18th century onward. There is a culture. All
the people, all the imported labor, doesn't get to
participate in Kuwaiti society in equal terms. The
Palestinians, the Filipino domestic workers who get
brutalized and raped and beaten up and so on and so
forth. None of those people get to participate. But
there is a Kuwaiti culture, and it is not noted for
its military valor.
Question: Do you remember the piece that appeared in
The New York Post about Bush being a war hero and the
tailgunner flying in formation and the story was
apparently that the tailgunner saw no puff of smoke.
Bush jettisoned the two guys in the tail, and let them
go down in flames.
MacArthur: I am inclined to give Bush the benefit of
the doubt on that one because I think I would have
done the same thing, probably, but who knows? The
interesting thing about that story though, is that as
you say, only one installment ran. It was supposed to
be a six-part series. They killed the last five parts.
The main witness who was in the plane behind Bush's
and who was the main source for the story, the White
House got to. It is sort of known in the business that
the White House got to him. We don't know how they got
to him, but he said in an interview a few months later
that he was contacted by the White House and now his
version of what happened is different, period. I think
that the strafing story is a really interesting story,
not a definitive story but it is one that we should
have known about.
Question: You spoke about the symbiotic relationship
between the government and the media, would you speak
a little more about proposal solutions that you would
endorse?
MacArthur: Well, as I said, since freedom of the press
is really guaranteed only to those who own one, there
is no clear solution other than self-education. I
mean, my book sold 12,000 copies and you can read it.
It is not a mass market best-seller. I did get on to
"60 Minutes" with the Nayirah story, which reached 30
million people, but that is a fluke. I mean, not to
take anything away from my reporting skills, but the
timing was right and "60 Minutes" jumped on it when
they saw it on the op-ed page of The New York Times.
The op-ed editor of the Times, Mike Levitas is a real
news-man. He came up in the 1950s when journalists
were called reporters and they didn't take on airs and
so-on. And so he said, "Hey, that is a great story.
Let's do it. Let's play it up." But that doesn't
happen very often.
There is one solution which Liebling suggested, which
is the endowed newspaper or the endowed magazine and
interestingly enough, The St. Petersburg Times is such
a newspaper. It is owned by a foundation. It is
allowed to operate for profit for the benefit of the
Nelson Poyntner Foundation because Poyntner was an
unusual guy who wanted to make sure that his way of
doing business would continue into the future. So the
editor of The St. Petersburg Times -- his name is Andy
Barnes -- could on his own steam, show up in the
Washington bureau one day, on the day the reporter who
broke the satellite photograph story was looking for
authorization to pay $3,000 for one more photograph to
complete the puzzle from the Soviet agency, and she
said, "Hey, Andy, can I have the money to buy it? I
have got an interesting story," and Andy said, "Sure,
you can do it." Now I do have to tell you that getting
money out of an editor at a modern newspaper is like
pulling teeth -- especially if it is connected with a
controversial story like this that could get the paper
into trouble. It just doesn't happen like that
anymore. But Barnes, because he has got independence
written into Poyntner's will, runs the paper. So he
can do whatever the hell he wants. Similarly, Harper's
Magazine is owned by a foundation, and I can do
anything I want. I don't have to answer to stock
holders, etc., etc. I have to answer to my board, but
my board generally agrees with what I am doing and
what Lewis Lapham is doing.
Question: Aside from The St. Petersburg Times, were
there any other bright lights news organizations in
the Gulf War?
MacArthur: Yes, there are individual stories like the
Bob Simon story that is a bright light. You know, I
have a footnote at the back of the book: A story of
four free-lancers who tried to do something different.
One of them is a local guy by the name of Jonathan
Franklin who got hired as an assistant, as a temporary
mortician at Dover Air Force Base. He took classes to
learn how to be a mortician so that he could be hired
at Dover. So that he could find out if the body count
the Pentagon was giving us matched the number of
bodies coming into Dover. Jonathan Franklin has
appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and a few
alternative papers. Jonathan Franklin is the only
reporter that I know who saw an American corpse in the
Gulf War. It is sort of a stunt, but don't you think
that it is a pretty good one? I mean I applaud that
kind of initiative.
A British freelancer who had been in the British Army,
put on his old regimental uniform and commandeered a
Bradley fighting vehicle, by pulling rank on the
Americans who were running it. He drove off and he got
the best footage anybody got of the armored battle
during the Gulf War.
An Englishman living in Toronto, Paul Roberts, went in
on camelback from Jordan into Iraq and risked his life
to come out with a really, really good story which
appeared in Saturday Night, a Canadian magazine.
These guys are few and far between, and they are not
celebrated. They are not famous for what they did. The
most egregious surrender that occurred during the Gulf
War in terms of symbolism and so-on, and I suppose in
substance, was that the four big dailies, the big
national dailies like the Los Angeles Times, The New
York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street
Journal, all pulled their correspondents from Baghdad.
Peter Arnett stayed; of course, he is a bright light.
But the big four papers ordered their people out. The
Los Angeles Times guy fought to stay in and finally
was reduced to saying to his boss, his former editor,
"I have to stay because my wife, Lucia Anuziatta has
to stay for her paper, La Republica." The Los Angeles
Times foreign editor said no.
Question: When and more importantly, why did this
transition start to happen? Was it USA Today, was it
CNN?
MacArthur: Mark Hertsgaard wrote a book called On
Bended Knee which is about the transition between more
or less combative reporting and suck-up journalism.
What I think happened -- and you have got to remember
that The Washington Post was all by itself. And we
don't know who Deep Throat was first of all. We don't
know if Deep Throat was a high government official who
made Watergate safe for The Washington Post until we
know who Deep Throat was. The jury is out on how brave
and independent the The Washington Post really was.
Nonetheless they did the right thing and they pursued
the story and we should all be grateful for it but you
have got to think back to 1972 when Woodward and
Bernstein were breaking their stories. Nobody was
following up.
I worked at The Washington Star in 1978, that was only
six years later, and the reporters used to joke about
how it was their job to knock down the Watergate
stories that Woodward and Bernstein were publishing.
Nobody was following up. There was the famous story of
CBS, where Walter Cronkite was going to do a special
on Watergate. Paley, the owner personally intervened
and cut it down, cut it in half, for the election when
it would have done some good.
Remember, it wasn't that great; it was better in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. Then I think what happens
is you have a collective sort of retrenchment because
journalism executives and owners are essentially
conservative people and there is still a lot of guilt
around about bringing Nixon down. Very strange
psychology. Fifteen years later, Nixon gives a speech
to the American Society of Newspaper Publishers and is
given a standing ovation. Okay?
Question: At the end of the war, we saw General
Schwarzkopf kind of unveiling the entire strategy of
the troops, and what area we occupied and how we moved
in. I was just wondering, was that necessary?
MacArthur: His famous briefing at the end where he
says Saddam Hussein is a jerk and not a soldier or
whatever? Yes, I believe some of it is true, but some
of it is not true. Everything was graphics and logos
and the stage-managing was all very carefully thought
out. Yes, the final part of that press conference is
part of that campaign to make it look like he is a
brilliant strategist and did everything right and that
he is a great war-leader. Not everybody agrees that
Schwarzkopf is tactically brilliant. If you read the
after-action reports of the Air Force, the Navy and
the Army, they all claim credit for having won the
Gulf War without any help with the other service
branches. The Air Force's is the most interesting
report because they say, and I think they are probably
right, that the war was over in the first ten minutes.
The great irony is because they knocked out Hussein's
command-and-control center. He was blind after the
first 15 minutes; electronically blind after 15
minutes. The way that the Air Force knew that they had
won the war was that Peter Arnett went dark on CNN.
They had knocked out his wire; they cheered in the
Situation Room in Washington when Arnett went dark
because they knew that everything was over. Everything
after that initial bombing campaign is just slaughter
-- just out and out slaughter with the Iraqis just
taking it. Whether the allies came in this way or that
is irrelevant, I believe.
Question: What do you say to the journalism students
and how do you spark enough harassability and meanness
into them?
MacArthur: You have got to fortify them with a sense
that at the end of their careers, at the end of their
lives, they are going to feel a lot better about
themselves if they try to tell the truth than if they
only made a million dollars, or that they got invited
to the White House for dinner five times.
=====
http://mediafilter.org/caq/caq61/caq61spylocal.html
http://home.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointel.htm
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/
http://www.evolutionzone.com/kulturezone/memetics/henson.memes.metamemes.and.politics
http://www.geocities.com/catzeye94109/Orwell.html
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