Look Back in Anger

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: SECOND FRONT

AUTHOR: JOHN R. MACARTHUR

PUBLISHER: HILL & WANG; 260 PAGES; $20

THE BOTTOM LINE: A gulf war opponent lacerates the U.S. press for having been too "patriotic," cooperative and gullible.

Bombing runs that visibly reduced Iraqi targets to instant rubble. Midair collisions between Scud and Patriot missiles. Pentagon press conferences explaining live the blow by blow of battle. To the U.S. public, these unforgettable images made the gulf war the most reported conflict in memory. But journalists, aware that enterprise was thwarted and that news organs served mainly as conduits for government, regard the war as a setback for press freedom and thus for holding bureaucrats accountable.

This is the plausible premise of John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's. But his book, which might have been valuable scholarship about how things went wrong, self-destructs from the opening page because of his obsessive rage that the war ever took place. To MacArthur, good journalism is by definition antiwar journalism. He cannot credit that anyone of intelligence and good faith might view the gulf conflict as politically necessary, let alone morally just. At most he acknowledges that the war was popular, but only so he can scorn as "commercial" and "cynical" any posture other than a lonely, unyielding crusade for peace. He denounces big organizations, including Time Warner, for trying to negotiate workable coverage with the Defense Department. He wanted them to walk out and join a protest lawsuit, co-sponsored by Harper's and other journals of opinion, that went nowhere.

In his fury at what he sees as Pentagon duplicity, MacArthur virtually demands that chief executives of large news organizations insult the government with defiance rather than hear its case. He seems not to grasp that the perception of just such behavior by reporters has alienated a large percentage of the public these news organizations are meant to serve. Although many readers complain that journalists do not seem patriotic, MacArthur thinks reporters should be neutral about whether their country's forces win or lose. He also dismisses in a sentence or two some practical reasons why the war was covered almost entirely on the Pentagon's terms: its brevity, the fact that so much of it was by air (in planes too small to accommodate the press) and, once it shifted to the ground, the rigorous terrain.

MacArthur quotes many leading journalists gloomily appraising gulf war coverage. But he has few revelations. By far his most striking was unveiled last January in a New York Times op-ed page piece. He debunks the headlined story that Iraqi invaders took Kuwaiti babies out of incubators to die. The star witness in a congressional investigation of this supposed episode was a teary 15-year-old using a pseudonym. She was, in fact, the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S., and MacArthur implies that the whole episode was concocted by Kuwaiti officials and their public relations agency, Hill and Knowlton, then eagerly taken up by President Bush.

MacArthur never seems to grasp the full significance of what the Pentagon actually did during the war, which is equivalent to what Ross Perot is doing in peacetime. By using live TV to reach the public, generals and their overseers could bypass the reporting process, cut out the middlemen, and thus avoid tough questions and independent opinion. Once upon a time, the public counted on reporters to journey to war for them. Satellite TV lets the public believe it has taken that journey for itself.