The INDEPENDENT INSTITUTE
October 7, 1993
Sheraton Palace Hotel, San Francisco
Sponsored by The Independent Institute
Independent Policy Forum Luncheon Honoring
JOHN R. MACARTHUR
Publisher, Harper's Magazine
Author, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War
Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War:
How Government Can Mold Public Opinion
Introduction by David Theroux, President, The Independent Institute:
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is David Theroux, I am
the president of the Independent Institute, and I am delighted to
welcome you to our Independent Policy Forum program today.
As many of you know, the Institute regularly sponsors programs
featuring outstanding experts to address major social, economic, and
foreign policy issues, especially as they may relate to important new
books. And, today is certainly no exception.
For those of you new to the Institute, you will find background
information on our program in the packet at your seat. The Independent
Institute is a non-profit, non-politicized, scholarly research and
educational organization which sponsors comprehensive studies of
critical public issues. The Institute's program adheres to the highest
standards of independent inquiry, and the resulting studies are widely
distributed as books and other publications, and are publicly debated
through numerous conference and media programs, such as in our forum
today. Our purpose is a Jeffersonian one of seeking the truth
regarding the impact of government policies, and not necessarily to
just tell people what they might want to hear. In so doing, we will
not take the public pronouncements of government officials at face
value, nor the conventional wisdom over serious public problems.
Hence, we invite your involvement, but be prepared for new and
challenging perspectives.
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, whose 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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?
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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?
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
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© 1996 The Independent Institute. Permission is granted to reprint or
broadcast this article if credit is given to the author and to the
Independent Institute. Nothing in this article should be interpreted as
necessarily reflecting the views of the Independent Institute or as an
attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any legislation.
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