<html>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Crazy Atheist Libertarian</TITLE>
<meta name="keywords" content="crazy, atheist, libertarian,
Crazy Atheist Libertarian, humanist, news, government, religion, crime, police">
</HEAD>
<body background="nevada.gif">
<pre>
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 05:38:54 -0500
To: Matthew Gaylor <<a href="mailto:freematt@coil.com">freematt@coil.com</a>>
From: Matthew Gaylor <<a href="mailto:freematt@coil.com">freematt@coil.com</a>>
Subject: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War: How Government Can
Mold Public Opinion
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by aztec.asu.edu id EAA28458
<p>
<<a href="http://www.independent.org/tii/content/events/f_macarth.html>">http://www.independent.org/tii/content/events/f_macarth.html></a>
<p>
The Independent Policy Forum
Transcripts
<p>
Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War:
How Government Can Mold Public Opinion
<p>
October 7, 1993
Sheraton Palace Hotel, San Francisco
<p>
John R. MacArthur
Publisher, Harper's Magazine
Author, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War
<p>
<p>
Introduction
David Theroux
President, The Independent Institute:
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Neither seeking nor accepting government funding, the Institute draws
its support from a diverse range of foundations, businesses, and
individuals, and we invite you to join with us as a tax-deductible
Independent Institute Associate Member. Also in your packet, you will
find information on the benefits in becoming a Member including
receipt of a free copy of our new, widely acclaimed, iconoclastic
book on unemployment and the economy, Out of Work, by Richard Vedder
and Lowell Gallaway. In addition, many of you may be interested in
our book, Arms, Politics and the Economy, an in-depth critique of the
defense establishment, especially in our post-Cold War era. Your
packet should have an Independent Briefing on the book.
<p>
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?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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."
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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."
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Presentation by John R. MacArthur:
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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."
<p>
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.
<p>
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."
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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!
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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?"
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.)
<p>
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."
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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?"
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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."
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Question: Who really supports the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour? Who pays for it?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Question: If the questions are not being asked, then isn't the
information never going to get out to the public?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Question: Aren't corporations really responsible for electing
politicians and hence the policies and misinformation that results?
<p>
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.
<p>
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"?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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?
<p>
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?
<p>
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?
<p>
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.
<p>
Question: Why didn't the Kuwaiti Army or defenses put up a battle
when they were invaded?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Question: Aside from The St. Petersburg Times, were there any other
bright lights news organizations in the Gulf War?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Question: When and more importantly, why did this transition start to
happen? Was it USA Today, was it CNN?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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?
<p>
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?
<p>
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.
<p>
Question: What do you say to the journalism students and how do you
spark enough harassability and meanness into them?
<p>
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.
<p>
E-mail <a href="mailto:Info@Independent.org">Info@Independent.org</a>
<p>
<hr>
Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues
Send a blank message to: <a href="mailto:freematt@coil.com">freematt@coil.com</a> with the words subscribe FA
on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week)
Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at
<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/</a>
<hr>
<p>
</pre>
<hr>
Visit the <a href="http://www.geocities.com/crazy_atheist">Crazy Atheist Libertarian</a>
<br>
Check out <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/atheists_united_arizona">Atheists United - Arizona</A>
<br>
Visit my atheist friends at <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/hashish_arizona">Heritics, Atheists, Skeptics, Humanists, Infidels, and Secular Humanists - Arizona</A>
<br>
<A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Cathedral/8650/">Arizona Secular Humanists</A>
<br>
<A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/ash_cooked_books">Paul Putz Cooks the Arizona Secular Humanist's Check Book</A>
<br>
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/government_crimes">News about crimes commited by the police and government</a>
<br>
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/religion_crimes">News about crimes commited by religious leaders and beleivers</a>
<br>
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/news_crazy_government">Some strange but true news about the government</a>
<br>
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/news_crazy_religion">Some strange but real news about religion</a>
<br>
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/news_weird_wacky">Interesting, funny but otherwise useless news!</a>
<br>
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/libertarian_talk">Libertarians talk about freedom</a>
</html>
Visit the Crazy Atheist Libertarian
Check out Atheists United - Arizona
Visit my atheist friends at Heritics, Atheists, Skeptics, Humanists, Infidels, and Secular Humanists - Arizona
Arizona Secular Humanists
Paul Putz Cooks the Arizona Secular Humanist's Check Book
News about crimes commited by the police and government
News about crimes commited by religious leaders and beleivers
Some strange but true news about the government
Some strange but real news about religion
Interesting, funny but otherwise useless news!
Libertarians talk about freedom