News Correspondents Claim Media Bought Military Spin on Gulf War

CBS News correspondent Betsy Aaron has covered conflicts for 27 years, but it was not until she reported on Operation Desert Storm that she felt so cut off from the realities of war. So skillful were the military briefings and so impressive the images of pinpoint bombing, she said, that it was easy to be lulled into forgetting that multitudes of Iraqis were actually dying.

“We got into bed with the military,” Aaron declared Friday at a Women, Men and Media symposium on war coverage. “There’s a price to pay when you climb into bed with someone.”

The military’s spin on the war was “bought by our bosses” and affected what she and most other network reporters were later able to broadcast from Baghdad, she said, adding that it was deemed “not good business” to raise questions about the conflict.

Speaking to a largely female audience of about 180 at the Bel Age Hotel in West Hollywood, Aaron and syndicated columnist Richard Reeves agreed that the news media by and large allowed themselves to be manipulated by the U.S. military into presenting a sanitized, one-sided version of the war. The panel, sponsored by USC’s School of Journalism and Institute for the Study of Women and Men, was entitled “Macho and Media Coverage of the Gulf War.”

“We have simply ignored the moral dimension,” said Reeves, who referred to the military news briefers as “PNN--Pentagon News Network” and the news media as “defense contractors.” As he traveled around the country during the war, he noticed that many papers were running virtually identical stories that seemed to come straight from military handouts, he said.

“They (the military) did their job,” he said. “We didn’t do ours.” The Pentagon has learned that if news can be tightly controlled for a day or two, the American people will become psychologically committed to the government’s position, he added.

Taking issue with Reeves, Capt. Michael Sherman, who created the first combat reporting pools in the Gulf, said, “People who say I was out there to put a spin on the news are either stupid or ignorant.”

Sherman, director of the Navy’s Office of Information and the officer who set up the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, blamed the complaints of manipulation on “wounded egos” and “whining.” He said many reporters were more motivated by competition with one another than by a desire to inform the public.

“The American public seems to be quite satisfied . . . as to what they saw,” he said.

While also finding fault with the news media for the “constant blathering by people from think tanks” and “too much reliance on technology,” Howard Rosenberg, The Times’ television critic, noted that the war yielded some benefits for women.

It became routine to see “powerful symbols” of women as military officers and war correspondents, and certain other stereotypes were also shattered, Rosenberg said. “The only person among reporters I saw really panic on television was not a woman--it was Charles Jaco of CNN,” he noted.

In an interview after the panel discussion, Aaron declined to specifically enumerate her complaints against CBS. Instead, stressing that she was referring to all the networks except CNN, she said: “There was a sensitivity about what you could and could not put on the air from Baghdad. And I think it was an oversensitivity.”

Women, Men and Media, a research and monitoring project dealing with gender issues, also released a study showing that at the height of the Gulf War in February, more than 85% of the front-page news and 70% of the local section first-page news in 20 selected newspapers was devoted to men. Military officials said that 10% of the U.S. forces in the Gulf were women.

When stories about military women appeared, they tended to center on their problems as parents, according to the study. The Times ranked last in front-page references to women and seventh in metro page references, the organization reported. The study was based on a tally of the number of times women’s names appeared in the coverage, either as sources or subjects of the articles.

Betty Friedan, the author of “The Feminist Mystique” and co-chair of Women, Men and Media, portrayed the study results as “ominous danger signals for women.” She told the gathering that there has been a “symbolic annihilation of women” in the media, as progress is being eroded.

During a second panel presented Friday, several speakers complained about the lack of serious movie roles for women. Songwriter Marilyn Bergman and screenwriter Anna Hamilton Phelan urged women to boycott films and television shows that trivialize women.