The Press: It Was a Public Relations Rout Too

By Richard Zoglin

In the days leading up to the ground war, reporters were so frustrated by their lack of access to the battlefield that they jumped at the chance to cover rehearsals for a massive amphibious landing on the Kuwaiti coast. As the exercises carried on, press coverage mounted and anticipation grew. Only one problem: the landing never came. The amphibious assault was a diversionary tactic intended to fool the Iraqis. And the press coverage, as General Norman Schwarzkopf pointedly observed, was a big help.

Amid the jubilation of victory last week, many journalists had an uneasy feeling that they had been routed nearly as decisively as the Iraqis. Throughout the war, the Pentagon did a masterly job of controlling the flow of information. The success of the military on the public relations front was a textbook campaign that may serve as a model for wars to come. The press, in the meantime, has a major job of image rebuilding ahead.

Tense relations between the media and the military were one of the most publicized sideshows of the gulf war. The battle lines were drawn early and hammered repeatedly. The Pentagon forced reporters to work in pools and imposed other restrictions on coverage; journalists, naturally, objected that they couldn't do their job. CNN's Peter Arnett and other TV reporters sent back dispatches from Baghdad showing civilian casualties; the public, naturally, complained that such reports were aiding the enemy. CBS correspondent Bob Simon, who had bucked the pools to strike out on his own, was captured, along with three colleagues, by Iraqi soldiers and spent 40 days in captivity before being released in Baghdad last week.

Through it all, one fact was nearly obscured: the gulf war was covered exhaustively. Last week's fast-moving ground offensive left many pool reporters unhappy as renegades like CBS's Bob McKeown (the first American journalist to reach Kuwait City) beat them to the big story. But for the people back home, it mattered little. Pictures of liberated Kuwait, give or take a few hours, reached TV in abundance. The allied battle plan, after having been kept secret for weeks, was eventually laid out in lavish detail. The bulk of the story was told, or soon will be.

Yet news about the war was carefully managed in a variety of ways. By herding reporters into pools, subjecting their stories to censorship and imposing other restrictions like the total news blackout at the start of the ground war, the Pentagon claimed it was making sure no confidential military information was revealed. The restrictions, however, gave the military a major say in where journalists could go and what they could report. A ban on showing pictures of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base, for example, was aimed at softening the coverage of U.S. casualties.

With little access to the battlefield, reporters had to depend on the daily briefings in Riyadh and Washington for news. Those were handled with extraordinary skill. The briefings were filled with facts and figures (number of missions flown, Scuds fired), and the men who conducted them were cooperative, usually candid and, when it came to estimates of enemy damage, very cautious. The goal was to avoid excessive optimism and reduce expectations.

If the Pentagon did not spread actual disinformation, it certainly welcomed the media's help in confusing the Iraqis. Schwarzkopf facetiously praised the press for making the initial allied buildup in Saudi Arabia seem greater than it was -- thus helping to discourage an Iraqi attack. A report early in the war that 60 Iraqi tanks had defected, it was later disclosed, was falsely planted by the CIA to try to lure more defectors. In the days before the ground offensive, reporters were frequently taken to see troops near the Kuwait border in order to distract the Iraqis from the hidden buildup going on far to the west.

Two important factors helped make the Pentagon's public relations campaign a success. First, the story was nearly all positive for the allies: courting favorable press coverage is much easier when there is little bad news to downplay or counter. Second, the war was short. Managing the news would surely have grown tougher if the ground war had dragged on.

The pool system, for one thing, would probably have broken down. Although the number of journalists allowed into the field in pools grew as the war went on (some 200 were with the troops during the ground campaign), editors and reporters continued to complain about the slowness with which pool reports were sent back from the front. "The system suffered from a lack of logistics," says Eric Schmitt of the New York Times. "We were constantly fighting the system." Others argue that the pool arrangement should not have lasted as long as it did. "The pool was never intended to be the be-all and end-all of coverage," says Fred Hoffman, a former Pentagon spokesman who helped devise the pool setup. "It shouldn't have been used beyond the earliest stages of the war." A lawsuit has been filed by several writers and magazines, including the Village Voice and the Nation, charging that the Pentagon restrictions violated the press's First Amendment rights.

The Pentagon's public relations savvy was fitting for a war that was waged as much on the propaganda front as on the battlefield. "The campaign in Saudi Arabia was managed like an American political campaign," says Robert Manoff, director of the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media. "Imagery was a dominant concern." Many in the military also wanted to redress what they regard as unfair press coverage of the Vietnam War. "It's obvious the government has been planning for a rematch since Vietnam," says Jon Katz, a former CBS News producer who writes about TV for Rolling Stone. "They were brilliantly successful."

Now the press corps must try to regroup. "There is probably greater public anger with the press than at any time since the end of the war in Vietnam," says First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. In the wake of a successful war, reporters -- who ask tough questions and sometimes bring bad news -- can seem to many Americans like the nerdy hall monitors at a senior prom. To others, journalists covering the war appeared all too eager to accept the military's version of the story. The press's job, however, is not necessarily to please either side -- only to look for the truth.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Dean Fischer/Riyadh and Leslie Whitaker/New York