The Net War, Where Rumor Rules

I have been horrified countless times covering nine wars and other assignments in 60 countries. But I’ve only been embarrassed twice. Once was when a freelancer for Mirabella magazine asked female soldiers during the Gulf War if it was difficult to find privacy to masturbate. The other time was when Jose Marti Airport resembled the fall of Saigon as network anchors abandoned Havana in the middle of Pope John Paul II’s visit to join the Zippergate media mob.

In pursuit of Monica Lewinsky’s kneepads, reporters have put rumor and innuendo on the same pedestal as fact. The public has suspected that the Dallas Morning News, the National Enquirer, Matt Drudge, Cokie Roberts, “Hard Copy” and the CBS “Evening News” are pretty much the same thing. If the same standards are transferred to the upcoming campaign against Iraq, the public will have been right, and the reporter from Mirabella can set up her own Web site to report any rumors that fly through the war zone.

The Gulf War belonged to television. The next one will be on the Internet, the ultimate media democracy. Cousin Bubba’s militia unit has a Web page. So does CNN. Both spew out information. And a public numbed by Geraldo Rivera as an NBC News correspondent and Martha Stewart as a legitimate reporter for CBS might be excused for figuring that data are data.

Not that those of us dressed in chem suits and waving gas masks did such a great job the last time around. We dutifully reported the U.S. Central Command’s claims that smart bombs were geniuses and that every laser-guided piece of ordnance landed within a millimeter of where it was supposed to. It took a 1996 General Accounting Office report to conclude that a lot of the bombs missed completely.

We parroted the line that the Patriot anti-missiles successfully intercepted incoming Scuds when we could see that the Patriots were slamming into the Scuds’ fuel tanks and that the Scuds’ explosive nosecones were being blown loose, falling randomly and going off on impact.

We accepted the Pentagon story that no allied troops were exposed to chemical agents. Several thousand cases of Gulf War Syndrome and several hundred missing pages of Desert Storm chemical detection logs later, we’re still arguing about that one.

This time, you won’t even see the few real reporters who tried to do their jobs seven years ago--no Bob Simon, breaking free of his military minders to cover the story in the field and being captured by the Iraqis; no Linda Patillo smashing through defensive sand berms with the Marines; not even a Bob Brown from Soldier of Fortune grousing that he hoped to be charging into Kuwait and was instead stuck in a hotel ballroom “surrounded by the biggest bunch of dweebs I’ve ever seen.”

Welcome to a limited air war with limited objectives and limited access. Thermal night lenses will pick up ghostly green images of phosphorescent anti-aircraft fire inscribing dotted arcs above Baghdad’s onion domes. Fuzzy black and white nosecone video will show the latest satellite-guided bombs rattling down the ventilation shaft of the Iraqi Defense Ministry building. And reporters and producers will be spoon-fed the latest information inside an over-air-conditioned Kuwait City hotel conference room.

But what about those rumors that the Pentagon may be covering up the capture of several American pilots by Iraq? Or the speculation that sex-starved servicemen and women are holding orgies inside a Kuwaiti hangar? Or the innuendo that Saddam Hussein has launched several missiles packed with anthrax in the direction of the aircraft carrier George Washington?

Can’t happen? Right-wing talk radio screeches that Vince Foster and Ron Brown were murdered. The San Jose Mercury reports that the CIA smuggled crack into the inner cities. The Wall Street Journal says a White House steward saw Lewinsky and the president alone. Dick Morris opines that the president strays because maybe the first lady is a closet lesbian.

All of those stories were either flat wrong or gossip. And millions of Americans believe them.

Network and local broadcasting executives long ago decided that news is just another form of infotainment to boost ratings, circulation and Web site hits. The name of the game is to maximize profit by giving the public what it wants. And it’s not much of a step from factoids about Monica or O.J. or JonBenet Ramsey to issues of war and peace, life and death.