Role of the Media in the Gulf War

The role of the media in the Gulf War was given a good deal of attention because of concerns raised by Ronald Reagan's incursion into Grenada, a battle that included restrictions on the press that were seen as unacceptable and as designed to prevent criticism of the action at home. Both the Bush Administration and the media were especially concerned about the issue of access, about whether the media would be told as much as it wanted to know about the conduct of the war or would be able to follow the troops right into battle. As it happened, the media played a major role in the Gulf War, with new technologies involving satellites and cable bringing the war directly into homes around the world and with correspondents broadcasting from the center of the action in Baghdad. Arguably, the way the media presented the war to viewers at home had much to do with how much support the war received, how well the Bush administration was able to carry through the policies it wished to implement for the conduct of the war. A question that needs to be analyzed is whether the image presented in the media was a misrepresentation of reality and whether the use of stereotypes of Iraq, Iraqis, and Arab people in general was so pervasive as to be a disservice to both Arabs and Americans alike.

The concern with public opinion both before and after a declaration of war has heightened as a consequence of the Vietnam War, perceived as a public relations disaster and as a war lost b

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an agenda in doing so: This frenzy of the visual, in which U.S. television has long specialized, has political consequences, but no politics per se. In the Gulf War, for example, it worked to the advantage of the US. military in favoring repeated showings of laserguided missiles hitting their targets squarely and spectacularly. But it also dictated that CNN would show scenes of what Iraq said was a civilian shelter destroyed by allied bombs. One Canadian reporter commented on this trend and its consequences when he wrote: The amazing production of the Television War, in which Israeli casualties can be seen in Technicolor, while the Iraqi dead are somehow invisible, should rate for high nomination in the Grammys. The public, for itself, can be educated in Orwellian grammar, where "ordnance" in fact means death from the sky and "sorties" are in fact not bombing raids but just the number of planes that have taken off that day. Television was not the only form of media covering the war, of course, nor was it the only type of media to misrepresent aspects of the war. Television coverage may have been shaped in large part by the demands of and nature of the technology and its relationship to its audience, but media coverage ov

Category: Government - R