"This was a tremendous manipulation of public opinion. The media let us down in whole-sale fashion in terms of the coverage. They accepted the handouts from the Pentagon. They relied on their authorized knowers and their official sources, and they didn't make, really, any attempt to give us an accurate picture of what      the reasons for this war were and what the results of this war were with respect to the terrible human carnage. So I think that from my perspective as a professor of Media Studies, the most important lesson was how little we could rely on the media to tell us what's going on."
Dr. James Winter, professor of Mass Communications at the University of Windsor, author of Common Sense: Media Portrayal of the Gulf War and Other Events

     The success of the Gulf War was determined by the overwhelming support of the international mass media. Without it, this century's most technologically advanced butchery could not have been legitimated in the eyes of the American public as The Mother of All Battles: a Noble Crusade against Islamic Militant Fanaticism for the establishment of a New World Order, the preservation of waning Family Values, the creation of jobs, and the maintenance of the price of gasoline - the holy elixir that keeps the American Dream running smoothly.
     In the "high-tech precision battle" with Iraq a bombing mission was carried out every single minute. This Nintendo War between Patriots and Scuds was the first real feel-good war that the cholesterol-laden testosterone-poisoned MTV/CNN-addicted American public had witnessed in half a century. Former U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush managed to beat the wimp image (at least temporarily) and end the deadly Vietnam Syndrome that forced the American military to fight without public support at home. Most importantly, however, Neil Bush's considerable investment in Bahrain oil was secured by his father's declaration that the U.S. has "a moral imperative" to police that area.
     A propaganda war was successfully waged against the American people through intensive 24-hour television and radio coverage from Baghdad, Riyadh, Kuwait City, Tel-Aviv, and the Persian Gulf. Newspapers and magazines attempted to outdo one another with coloured maps of the region. Gulf War playing cards quickly became a hot item. In a format considered palatable to the largely uneducated populace of McDonaldLand, the constant barrage of glossy-packaged journalism provided predigested ethnocentric distorted historical, religious, political, and geographical information on the Middle East.
     The mass media maintained its illusion of objectivity, restricting media access to talking heads within the ranks of the government and the military, and rejecting many news stories considered unimportant for the American public. Not wanting to risk the friendly relationship between the press and government information sources, news journalists neglected to raise questions that the military declared off-limits. By abdicating their role as critical, adversarial journalists, they transformed their role from government watchdogs to government lapdogs to preserve their ratings-conscious profit-oriented media bureaus and maintain the likelihood
of government deception. In his essay The War Psychoses, Mark Twain documented the fact that traditionally, many Americans speak out in opposition to the build-up of every war. However, once the killing starts, almost everybody goes mad with blood-lust and few question military authority. Two days before the
bombardment of Iraq began on January 16, a CNN poll showed that 51% of the American public still opposed the war. Two days after the killing began, a
similar poll showed that 97% now supported the war. The triple-headed media beast DanRatherTedKoppelTomBrokaw hosted ample coverage of soldiers heading off to war and mothers tying yellow ribbons on trees in a ritualistic attempt to return their sons and daughters to them unharmed by chemical weapons or friendly fire. While Americans were seen expressing their support for the war in cities across the U.S., very little coverage was shown of the protests and demonstrations of the large anti-war movement in the U.S. A mid-winter demonstration of 250,000 in Washington received four seconds of media coverage. By February, there had been over 3,200 protests against the war in the U.S. alone, though these events were not represented in the media. Reporters were punished for being sympathetic
to the anti-war movement. An editor in Pennsylvania was fired for writing an article entitled How About a Little Peace?
     Selective control was exercised over which journalists got into Saudi Arabia to cover the war. Visas were not given to critical journalists from alternative media sources. "For reasons of national security", press pools involved only 190 of the 1400 journalists, technicians, and photographers that were stationed in the Persian Gulf region during the war. Displeasing military censors resulted in the loss of press credentials and being dropped from the pool. Reporters from The New York Times who displeased the military were denied interviews, put on long- term hold, had their credentials pulled and were removed from the pool.
     Of the 190 journalists permitted to cover the war, only 30 were allowed to be at the front to cover hostilities at any given time, and these reporters were forced to stay with their military escorts at all times. All stories were subject to security review (military censorship). One reporter from The Detroit Free Press filed a story which described pilots returning from bombing missions as giddy. The military censor changed it to proud. A compromise was eventually arrived at with pumped up.
Military censors then delayed the story by two days. The Defense Department referred to the invasion of Iraq as Desert Storm, which is a naturally occurring phenomenon beyond human control.
Military intelligence reports depicted a battle of high-tech smart bombs and surgical strikes carried out with pin-point accuracy. Now and then, there was the odd bit of collateral damage (translation: the killing of innocent civilians) and sometimes, the Desert storm forces were guilty of accidentally "pulling a friendly" (translation: the killing of not-so innocent brainwashed former-civilians). The American public was presented with the image of a sterile war without casualties. Throughout the entire
battle, no casualty estimates were ever given on national television. According to Theodore Postol, an MIT physicist and former Pentagon advisor, the American Patriot missiles had been "an almost total failure".
The triumphant scenes of Iraqi scud missiles being destroyed that American believed in - because they saw it live on CNN - had really just been the primitive scuds breaking apart by themselves. Of the 84,000 tons of bombs that the U.S. forces dropped on Iraq, 91% were "dumb" bombs - or simple iron gravity bombs, and 75% of those missed their targets.
     An article entitled Mad Dogs and Englishmen in the February 3, 1991 edition of The Guardian Weekly described the use of rhetoric by the British Press in waging the psychological war against Iraq. British soldiers were described in the press as lion-hearted boys and resolute lads, while the Iraqi troops were called brainwashed troops and fanatical hordes. The young knights of the skies launched first strikes pre-emptively, while the bastards of Baghdad launched sneak missile attacks without provocation. The allied army, navy and air force would precision bomb and cause collateral damage, while the Iraqi war machine would fire wildly at anything in the skies, causing civilian casualties.
     The brave American troops were loyal to George Bush, who was resolute, statesmanlike, and at peace with himself, while the ruthless Iraqi mad dogs were blindly obedient to Saddam Hussein, the demented crackpot monster and evil tyrant. Heroic allied troops suffered a high rate of attrition and failed to return from missions, whereas the Iraqi cannon fodder were shot out of the sky. Professional Allied troops would dig in and take out, while cowardly Iraqis would cower in their foxholes and kill. Ironically, the confident, yet cautious allies were reported to have reporting guidelines and press briefings, while the desperate and cornered Iraqis reportedly had censorship and propaganda.
     As in any war, the enemy was dehumanized as much as possible in the popular media. Returning American pilots referred to the Iraqis as cockroaches, camel-jockeys, and sand- niggers. Saddam Hussein was portrayed as The Butcher of Baghdad: an irrational mad-man, with many obvious comparisons made to Adolf Hitler. The implication manufactured by the U.S.
military that Saddam Hussein desired to conquer Saudi Arabia helped further justify the war effort, especially in the mind of George Bush, who saw the war as a potential re-run of Hitler's unquestioned invasion of France in 1940.
     To further demonize the enemy leader, the New York Times carried an editorial-page cartoon entitled "The Descent of Man" with a picture of Clark Gable, then a gorilla, a monkey, a snake, and finally Saddam Hussein.
An editorial in The Globe and Mail read: "The world faces war in the middle east because of the intransigence of one man", referring to Hussein. Saddam became known as an environmental terrorist for his supposed scorched-earth policy, and at a time when North American ecological sensitivity and news coverage was at it's peak, this was quite a serious castigation. He also had the opportunity to make a guest appearance in the American war-comedy Hot Shots, starring Charlie Sheen.
    The New York Post ran a front page picture of Saddam Hussein patting the head of a child hostage with the headline "Child Abuser". Combined with the term "naked aggression" coined by George Bush, and the "Rape of Kuwait" theme brought out in headlines throughout the war, the Iraqi leader was symbolically implicating in some form of sexual assault, and effectively demonized before the wholesome American public. The average response to a CNN video-survey taken of deep-south small-town Americans for their opinion on Saddam was: "If I had a gun, I'd shoot him."