The Press: It Was a Public Relations Rout Too

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.