Operation Desert Storm was a practice run in press manipulation
The 1991 Gulf War initiated the “CNN effect”
By the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975, the Pentagon had learned its lesson about granting reporters unrestricted access to overseas ground deployments. When the Gulf War began, a decade and a half later, journalists were tightly corralled into “pools” of camera operators and radio and print reporters and escorted on press junkets under the supervision of watchful public affairs officers, an arrangement that authorities had practiced on a smaller scale in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). As a result, Americans experienced much of the war — a two-phased coalition offensive against Iraq — via video feed from cameras attached to U.S. bombers and long-distance footage of the psychedelic trails left by dueling Scud and Patriot missiles hurtling through inky-green night skies.
Photographers were often left making pictures of practice drills or portraits of soldiers during downtime, chilling in the sand dunes drinking Coke and playing Frisbee. Like the “jarhead” marines they were deployed with, journalists were for the most part removed from the actual violence being perpetrated by bombing raids and missiles (hence the “video game” moniker quickly adopted by the press). From their perspective, hunkered down in the Saudi desert, the war might as well have been a mirage.
An Associated Press caption from October 1990 compared U.S. troop deployments in the desert to “toys in a sandbox.”
Perhaps the most indelible pictures from the war were the ones aired by the Cable News Network (CNN), which by chance was the only outlet broadcasting from inside Iraq when the bombing began on January 17, 1991. CNN’s 24-hour coverage from inside a Baghdad hotel was a milestone in television news, garnering the fledgling network new subscribers and effectively reshaping the traditional morning-evening news cycle into the nonstop, always-on flow of information we know today.
Still, the framing was remote — a light show seen behind the ducked heads of foreign correspondents, a bombardment without casualties. News imagery adopted surreal tones in this disjointed hyperreality, monotony mixed with the urgency of distant death.
Ironically, some of the most visible violence from the time occured not in Iraq or Kuwait but in U.S. cities like San Francisco, where anti-war demonstrators torched cop cars and ransacked the U.S. Army recruiting center. When we did see the impact of battle, it was in the tangled vehicles of a retreating Iraqi army annihilated by airstrikes. Pictures of human casualties on the infamous Highway of Death were heavily censored in U.S. media.
In a 1991 New York Times op-ed, filmmaker Ken Burns asks, “How do we understand an event when there are so few pictures?” Read rhetorically, Burns’s very modern line of inquiry is a prescient statement about the rapidly shifting news landscape. His equation of seeing with understanding feels almost naive now. But at the time, pictures were still considered evidentiary by nature — a notion that would continue to slip away when the U.S. returned to Iraq a decade later, waging a new war premised on ephemeral — if not sinister — motives and characterized by a continued dearth of openness. While the military allowed reporters to “embed” with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the most poignant images we’ve seen from those wars aren’t owed to the State Department’s transparency; rather, they’re the result of increased accessibility to digital photography by the combatants themselves.
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