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Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War Hardcover – June 19, 1992

by John R. MacArthur (Author)

4.2 10 ratings

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Second Front documents in vivid detail the behind-the-scenes activities by the U.S. and Kuwaiti governments which limited the American media’s constitutional right to observe, question, and report on activities during Operation Desert Storm. In frank and startling interviews with, among others, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Ben Bradlee, Katharine Graham, Robert Wright, and Pete Williams, John R. MacAuthur shows how the press corps was treated more like a fifth column than as representatives of a free people. He demonstrates how, despite the torrent of words and images from the Persian Gulf, Americans were systematically and deliberately kept in the dark about events, politics, and simple facts during the Gulf crisis.

With a reporter’s critical eye and a historian’s sensibility, he traces decades of press-government relations—during Vietnam, Grenada, and Panama—which helped set the stage for restrictions on Gulf War reporting and for a public-relations triumph by the government. His analysis of the issues that confronted the media in this war is frightening testimony to what happens when the government goes unchallenged, when questions go unasked.

Print length

260 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Hill and Wang
Publication date

June 19, 1992
Dimensions

5.8 x 0.95 x 8.6 inches
ISBN-10

0809085178
ISBN-13

978-0809085170
See all details

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The publisher of Harper's magazine here decries what he sees as the Pentagon's efforts to sanitize the Gulf war. First he reviews the Defense Department's technique during Grenada of creating a media pool and ensuring that it arrived after the action, and in Panama of virtually imprisoning the pool on an army base. He then turns to "Operation Desert Muzzle," as he calls it, a "devastating and immoral victory" for military censorship and a "crushing defeat" for the press and the First Amendment. MacArthur expresses revulsion at the media's timid acquiescence to the Pentagon's tight control of news, combined with its "out-and-out boosterism and jingoism." He criticizes Dan Rather's casual but heartfelt "salute to our young men and women out there" as offensive. In a final scene, for which his puzzling metaphor is Nathanael West's Day of the Locust , MacArthur describes how reporters at a postwar Washington banquet fawned over Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf: " . . . the Fourth Estate bowing to a man who had treated them with contempt." The tendency in the media, the author warns in this somewhat shrill treatise, is toward more and more supine, "suck-up" coverage of military operations.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The United States was partly pushed into the Persian Gulf war by a slick public relations campaign on behalf of Kuwait. Concurrently, the Pentagon coolly executed a censorship program accepted by a timid, divided American media. That is the thesis offered by MacArthur, publisher of Harper's magazine, in his solidly documented indictment of media performance during the war. He faults both print and broadcasting for ineffective or nonexistent protests against censorship and for poor war reporting. (On obstacles to strong reporting in recent years, see Peter Stoler's The War Against the Press , LJ 12/86.) MacArthur deserves credit for illuminating interviews with CBS anchor Dan Rather and others, though his sarcastic tone, particularly on the subject of Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams, somewhat detracts from his argument. Recommended for media collections.
- Bruce Rosenstein, "USA Today" Lib., Arlington, Va.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Seldom have the American media appeared so hornswoggled, so cowardly, or so supine in defending the First Amendment as they are portrayed as being in this bitter polemic on Persian Gulf War coverage by the publisher of Harper's. Virtually from the moment American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait, MacArthur contends, the Bush Administration ``never intended to allow the press to cover a war in the Persian Gulf in any real sense.'' In the wake of tight news-management of Grenada and Panama, that doesn't come as a surprise; the real revelation here, based on numerous interviews with journalists and close critical analysis of news accounts, is how the press played along in the hope of grabbing the few scraps of news that fell from the government's table. According to MacArthur, Pentagon spokesperson Peter Williams decisively outflanked the media through his blandly mendacious reassurances that the press would be provided access to the conflict in stages. Thereafter, journalists--confined to press``pools'' that were escorted by armed-forces representatives- -became glorified stenographers for Pentagon propagandists. MacArthur details how the press apparently uncritically accepted and disseminated self-serving myths perpetrated by the Bush Administration and the Kuwaiti government's American p.r. flacks- -including myths about Kuwaiti babies snatched from incubators by Iraqi soldiers, the precision of ``smart bombs,'' and the exaggerated size and morale of Saddam Hussein's forces. Afterward, MacArthur says, journalists who didn't yield to hand-wringing over the government's jawboning fawned over General Schwarzkopf or led the cheerleading for their own organization's pathetic coverage. Some of MacArthur's conclusions--notably, the importance of the incubator story in the crucial Congressional debate on the war- -seem overdrawn, and he resorts to unrelieved sarcasm to buttress his case. But few readers can finish his powerful account without fearing for the future of freedom of the press--and of American democratic institutions. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hill and Wang; First Edition (June 19, 1992)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 260 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0809085178
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0809085170
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.8 x 0.95 x 8.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,381,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,995 in Public Affairs & Administration (Books)
- #4,346 in Middle Eastern Politics
- #11,656 in Communication & Media Studies

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John R. MacArthur

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JOHN R. MACARTHUR is the president and publisher of Harper's Magazine. An award-winning journalist, he has previously written for The New York Times, United Press International, The Chicago Sun-Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of the acclaimed books You Can't Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America, The Selling of Free Trade: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy, and Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. He lives in New York City.

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Robin Orlowski

I wish I had read this earlier

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2001

During the Gulf War, I was an elementary schooler who eagerly bought the propaganda the government. my school district, and hometown were promoting in the name of patrotism.
I earnestly snapped up everything and anything having to do with the millitary, American Flags or Yellow Ribbons convinced that our side was the right side--and unlike the war in Vietnam, the reasoning for deployment was universally accepted by the American people. Although I now realize there were people voicing conciencious objection to war with Iraq (because among other reasons, we had once supported Saddam Hussein's rise to power including oulfiting his troops with weapons when it suited our international interests and did not seriously care what would happen to the people of Iraq afterwards), if given any coverage in the national news at all, they were riddiculouslsy marginalized as outcasts who were living in a gigantic timewarp and did not understand that this was the 1990's.
My parents, having lived through Vietnam, were more cynical about the millitary opperation--but did not challenge the advertising marketed towards their daughter for fear of being perceived as unsupportive of America's objectives. Because they realized that the Gulf War was fought partly over US Petroleum interests, support was actually a more complex issue than I was receiving from media, institutional, and peer socialization.
MacArthur and Bagdikian provide a wealth of information for anybody who wants to revisit this time in international/American history and uncover the truth that all too quickly disappeared and was ommitted in the name of national unity. The so-called "liberal-media" defered to government preferences and reporting angles in it's coverage of the Persian Gulf, reducing 20 years of profoundly complex relations in this region of the world to a binary presentation of "good guys v. bad guys". The ultimate loosers in this scenario of course are the American people who never get to see the full justifications of their leaders, policy makers and public officials.
Although we think of information suppression as something that was supposed to be eliminated with post-Vietnam millitary oversight procedures and policies, they continued during this event---in an albeit more subtle way. In the world of public policy, just because you cannot see something does not mean that it is non-existent.
Granted, looking at a gritter past may be hard, but this action is neccesary to fully understand how media and politics work together in times of war--and not necessarily for the benefit of the citizens at large. The timelieness of this scholarship is wholly appreciated and badly needed.

46 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Read this book!

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2004

I wish the author of this book had gotten more media coverage prior to Gulf War Redux. It is a fascinating look at the inner workings of the so-called free press, and the difficult and dysfunctional relationship a journalist has with the DOD, Pentagon...all those governmental "powers that be"....Check it out. Definately.

4 people found this helpful

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Earth that Was

How wars are got up in the Middle East...

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2011

Verified Purchase

Harper's Magazine publisher John Macarthur has delivered an excellent piece of journalism on journalism, or at least, on war journalism. Macarthur's "Second Front", subtitled "Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War", provides a well written and easy to read, quick to read survey of the issues surrounding the media's virtual enlistment into Gulf War 1. Dedicated, amongst others to the great "left Jeffersonian" writer Walter Karp, the book definitely shows a Karp like attention to clear thinking and clear unencumbered writing.

Six chapters and an afterword penned in 1993 take the reader through the whole field. The "pool" system is examined. Modelled on British experience in the Falklands, it tended to control and co-opt reporters, turning the media's normally competitive instincts into a form of mild self censorship designed to "not rock the boat" and maintain the almighty privilege of "access." In prisons this is called the "trustee" system! Macarthur shows how news management preceeded once Desert Shield turned into Desert Storm, and how once the dust settled, how major media organisations, perhaps flushed with Victory themselves, failed to respond to restrictive regime they had just been exposed to. Although naturally beyond the scope of Macarthur's 1993 book, this "lost opportunity" to seek correction after Gulf War 1 perhaps better explains the weakness of the media in the subsequent dozen or so years than most theories mooted more recently.

There are two stand out chapters. One dealing with the wholly fabricated story of Iraqis allegedly stealing Kuwaiti baby incubator cribs is told in full detail. This story will surely be a textbook case of the worst kind of wartime propaganda for decades to come. Despite 24 hour television channels and satellite coverage, we haven't learned anything since the days of Lord Bryce and the alleged massacre of Belgian civilians by the Huns. Indeed Lord Bryce would presumably consider late 20th century / early 21st century moderns a more gullible audience. Macarthur's summary of this story is thus a useful resource. The 2002 Niger Yellowcake fiasco seems to me like the one true offspring of those Kuwaiti cribs. Macarthur played a major role in revealing this hokum to the world. It was his January 1992 New York Times op-ed piece that first told the story, winning for Macarthur a number of journalism awards in the process. This chapter is perhaps the definitive book version. Macarthur is perhaps overly humble in his narrative, he doesn't mention his own role in exposing the story. What he does mention, but not as thoroughly covered as the incubators, is the story of the now historically vindicated Russian commercial satellite pictures, known to all the major TV networks at the time, that showed that Pentagon "estimates" of the number of Iraqi troops and tanks waiting poised on the other side of the Saudi border were vastly exaggerated.

Another excellent chapter focuses on the "Vietnam Syndrome." Here Macarthur debunks the myth that accused the media of losing the Vietnam War. In contrast the overwhelming majority of reporters sympathised with Washington's war goals and even "radical critics" like Halberstam, were really mouthpieces for "the young Turks" of the Army and CIA. The Turks felt Westmoreland's West Point strategy was stodgy and lost initiative to the Vietcong, they favoured new tactics to win the same objectives. Throwing one's lot in with the loyal opposition hardly makes one a defeatist. The media did however turn against the war but late and for the most part the public and much of Congress was ahead of them by that stage. Still the myth of media defeatism in Vietnam became a raison d'etre for the military's desire for enhanced media management post-Vietnam. Macarthur doesn't say this, but the whole phantom menace of Vietnam Syndrome may merely represent just another example of the mundane sins of blame shifting and "killing the messenger of bad news." For a wider discussion of "Vietnam Syndrome" and the whole "Lessons from 'Nam" debate I'd refer the reader to Earl C. Ravenal's "Never Again" which attempts a taxonomy of the rival lessons mooted by different teachers.

I would recommend John Macrthur's "Second Front" be read along with foreign policy academic Robert W. Tucker's "The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America's Purpose" for anyone trying to understand Gulf War 1 and how this set the stage for America's current middle east quagmire. Both books have the advantage of being written before 9-11 and hence their lessons and logic strike me as deeper and less influenced by or less distorted by one tragic (but preventable) event. In short, the lesson I read from both these books read together, is that the apparently cheap and easy victory in Gulf War 1 was a grand illusion. An illusion partly fed by a media unwilling to criticize and a public, blinded by victory, and unwilling to listen to bad news. And that illusion has come back to demand repayment with interest. With the recent death of Bin Laden one wonders if the similar mistakes will be repeated.

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George W. Bush

Excellent book.

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2003

Ignore the crypto-fascists who were unable to put down their copies of MEIN KAMPF long enough to actually read this book. Very original and thought provoking.

10 people found this helpful

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Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War Hardcover – June 19, 1992

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John R. MacArthur

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