Lies, damned lies and the media

Wednesday, April 10, 1991 - 10:00

Editorial: Lies, damned lies and the media

Everyone "knows" what happened during the Gulf War: we saw it on television and read the "camera witness" accounts in the daily papers.

But the "precision" bombing of Iraq portrayed by US officials during the Gulf War, and faithfully reflected in the "news" media, was a fiction.

This was admitted by the US Air Force chief of staff, General Merril McPeak, during a press briefing last month. While claiming that precision bombs were 90% accurate, McPeak disclosed that they were only about 7% of the total tonnage of US bombs dropped.

Laser-guided "smart" weapons accounted for only 6520 of 88,500 tons that US planes dropped on Iraq and Kuwait.

Later, a senior Pentagon official said the 81,980 tons of "dumb", or unguided, bombs had an accuracy of only about 25%. So, of 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait, 70% missed their targets. Which is not to say that they didn't hit anything.

The bombs that missed — such as the ones that hit civilian buildings near the Iraqi Interior Ministry — were photographed in many cases, just like the "smart" bombs. The Pentagon "managed" the news by releasing only film which showed "success".

These disclosures have produced some agonising in parts of the less Neanderthal US media. For example, columnist Tom Wicker wrote in the March 20 New York Times:

"The real, and dangerous, point is that the Bush administration and the military were so successful in controlling information about the war that they were able to tell the public just about what they wanted the public to know. Perhaps worse, press and public largely acquiesced in this disclosure of only selected information."

The "public" didn't have a lot of choice, since it didn't, for the most part, realise it was being lied to. But there's no excuse for the commercial media — here just as much as in the US — which didn't even try to look beyond the official handouts, simply because what they were being told matched what their owners wanted us to believe.