War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (review)

24Film & History, Vol. XXII, Nos. 1&2, February/May 1992 BOOK REVIEW War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War Philip M. Taylor, 1992 Manchester University Press/St. Martin's Press pp. xiv+338, $19.95. Philip Taylor has written a substantial, well-argued book about an important subject, and managed to get it into print with a timeliness generally denied serious academic undertakings. His lucid introduction lays out arguments as to the meaning and use of propaganda in our age ('a process of persuasion') with a richness of detail certain to benefit die-hards for whom propaganda remains a synonym for lies. He justifies his historian's eclectic methodology with a grace sure to disarm students of communications theory who cannot imagine the systematic study of mass media minus charts of tabular data. Few can deny the importance of serious inquiry into media coverage of 1991's Gulf War, the war which made CNN (Cable Network News) an international media celebrity, awar in which cable television enabled Saddam Hussein and George Bush to watch how each other's war was played, the first war to make use of the home video cassette. Taylor is careful to note the risks ofwriting history so soon after the events described. Until official archives become available to scholars, we shall have no exhaustive answer to many substantial questions: what Saddam really intended, what American military technology really accomplished, and what Joint Operations policy actually achieved. But Taylor is correct in suggesting that media coverage of the war, plus the immediate media post-mortems, allow one to draw important conclusions as to what was and was not covered by the media. This book owes its origins to the decision of Nicholas Pronay, Director of the Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds, to record by satellite all British coverage of the war between January and March 1991, the CNN coverage, plus a good bit of NBC and CBS coverage as it appeared on British TV. Taylor also includes careful analysis of major American and British newspapers. The result is a major body of material which allows Taylor to be exhaustive about his central interest, the media, particularly television. Taylor deplores his book's lack of illustrations, but offers no explanation for the failure to include so much as a single frame from a single television story, though a simple technology now exists to do so, if not, perhaps, at Leeds. Taylor focuses on three case studies: the battle of Khafji (where Iraqi soldiers captured a town); the smart missiles which hit the bunker or civilian shelter in the Amiriya section of Baghdad; and the final battle of Mutah Gap, which marked the rout of Saddam's army. Taylor relies on numerous journalists' accounts to summarize what was said by official spokesmen, what was discovered by the media, and what actually happened. He admits that it probably was a civilian shelter hit through an error in intelligence. This book devotes a great deal of space to analyzing the way in which the military controlled media access to information. Taylor is no friend of censorship on philosophical Book Review 25 grounds, but is aware that all state information policy depends on the shaping of content and limitation of access, methods which inevitably involve censorship, done with a light or heavy hand. He notes that in the Gulf War, disinformation was a key to success on the battlefield, even if it meant that many in the media were taken in by endless talk of a final Marine Corps attack from the sea to free Kuwait City. Taylor makes a number of important points in his concluding chapter. Media coverage was supportive and uncritical, over 1000 reporters actually offering monopoly in the guise of pluralism. The war helped redefine the relationship between media and their audience. Viewers did not share the media's obsession for speedy transmission of information, preferring, ifrarely receiving, factual accuracy. Television images reinforced and amplified the 'distancing' provided by air power. The real Gulf War involved old-fashioned 'dumb' bombs, dropped on Iraqi forces during the final battle, something simply not covered by television. Saddam revealed an inadequate understanding of how to direct...