From Publishers Weekly
The publisher of Harper's magazine here decries what he sees as the Pentagon's efforts to sanitize the Gulf war. First he reviews the Defense Department's technique during Grenada of creating a media pool and ensuring that it arrived after the action, and in Panama of virtually imprisoning the pool on an army base. He then turns to "Operation Desert Muzzle," as he calls it, a "devastating and immoral victory" for military censorship and a "crushing defeat" for the press and the First Amendment. MacArthur expresses revulsion at the media's timid acquiescence to the Pentagon's tight control of news, combined with its "out-and-out boosterism and jingoism." He criticizes Dan Rather's casual but heartfelt "salute to our young men and women out there" as offensive. In a final scene, for which his puzzling metaphor is Nathanael West's Day of the Locust , MacArthur describes how reporters at a postwar Washington banquet fawned over Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf: " . . . the Fourth Estate bowing to a man who had treated them with contempt." The tendency in the media, the author warns in this somewhat shrill treatise, is toward more and more supine, "suck-up" coverage of military operations.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The United States was partly pushed into the Persian Gulf war by a slick public relations campaign on behalf of Kuwait. Concurrently, the Pentagon coolly executed a censorship program accepted by a timid, divided American media. That is the thesis offered by MacArthur, publisher of Harper's magazine, in his solidly documented indictment of media performance during the war. He faults both print and broadcasting for ineffective or nonexistent protests against censorship and for poor war reporting. (On obstacles to strong reporting in recent years, see Peter Stoler's The War Against the Press , LJ 12/86.) MacArthur deserves credit for illuminating interviews with CBS anchor Dan Rather and others, though his sarcastic tone, particularly on the subject of Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams, somewhat detracts from his argument. Recommended for media collections.
- Bruce Rosenstein, "USA Today" Lib., Arlington, Va.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Bruce Rosenstein, "USA Today" Lib., Arlington, Va.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
