Media already has a key role in our democratic society.

As in a democratic society the citizen, by the way of election, gives the power of decision; the capability to convince the citizen is the only way to reach power. So control of media means control of power.

The power of the media increases.

Thanks to the modernisation and the technological advance, a broadcast, for instance, can reach a great number of countries at the same time. More and more people seem to be addicted to TV. Children spend more and more time watching TV. The eight o’colck news is for many the only way to be informed of what is going on in the world.

Is the increasing media power a danger for democracy? Is it a step toward a new kind of totalitarianism? Or is it the the final realisation of democracy for "everybody"?

Answer.

I want to try to answer this question by analysing the way in which the Gulf war was reported on screen and by the newspapers. Why did I chose the Gulf war? First, it is a conflict, and during conflict new changes and transformations always appear. Secondly, both Bush and Hussein, need to convince and be supported by the public. They both fight with the same weapons, the military and the media. Lastly, the Gulf is connected to the "fear of Islam" by the western world, and this will be a important feature of the twenty-one century.

So, what are the specifics questions concerning the Gulf war?

How was the media used? Did Bush and Hussein use it in the same way? How much the public were being told and how much was held back? Were they trying to convince the same people? Did the role of the media change between the begining and the end of the war? What are the impact of the previous propaganda campain on modern media coverage? Did the capability of the media increase? Is the media more or less reliable? We will examine the distinctive character of the media’s role in an age of accassible global telecommunication networks.

The Gulf war and the media coverage is a subject that include a wide range of field. Three main areas can be distinguish.

Ê The area of international relation: Which refers to politic, diplomacy, military, problem of oil resource, the role of Islam in the next century, the Middle East problem (Israel, Iran..)

Ë The Media, and communication area: the use of the new mediatic technology, the role of the media, the extension of the media in our society.

Ì The psychological studies: The use of propaganda, the manipulation of public opinion.

This is this variety of topics include in the subject that provide the interest as well as the difficulty to treat the question of the Gulf war and the media coverage. All the areas have not been explored in this essay, so far it’s possible. The plan proposed tried to treat some of them in a logic repartition.

Ê First Part: The first part of my study recall in a chronological way the military development of the war with a focus on all the important mediatic events.

Ë Second Part: The second part provide answers of questions that the subject rise:

Propaganda is a word that everybody has in mind when thinking about the Gulf war. But what is propaganda? A focus is made about the role the media and Public Relation Firm that helped to go to war. The relation among three poles, policy-makers, media and public. Who tried to influence the other, what kind of relation they run?

US had finally fought a war on the information front no less successfully than they had on the field of battle. The US appeared to be still fighting the trauma of the Vietnam war as much, if not more so, than the war against Saddam Hussein. Especially for a military point of view, during the Vietnam war, the opponent who defeat the USA army wasn’t the Vietnam army but was the US own media. Indeed television was widely blamed for having alienated American public sympathy and support. So the very clear objective, was a rapid war enabling little time for public protest to emerge.

The pre-war American anxieties about body bags, a hostile media and a poor American military performance had proved unwarranted. The Vietnam Syndrome had been exorcised.

Small wonder that in the early and mid-1960 s the oil shaikhs became the focus of subversion and destabilization by the leader of radical Arab nationalism: Nasser.

After oil-shaikhs became the target of another radical figure, Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran: He condemned them for their corrupt, autocratic ways, for refusing to share power with their subjects as enjoined by Quran, for selling oil cheaply to the West, particularly to America, the Great Satan, and, finally, for having failed to liberate Palestine.

So accurate was their fear of the propaganda by revolutionary Iran that the Saudu rulers encouraged SH to attack it in September 1980. He contained the tide of revolutionary Islam, and made the futur of Gulf monarch safe.

But less than two years after the end of Iran-Irak war, SH adopted the two-point programme for the Gulf that Khomeini had conceived but failed to implement: raising the oil price and overthrowing the Gulf monarchs.

Is there something objective in this reccurrent attacks of Gulf monarch? If yes the next one is only a matter of time.

But US dont want to change the done: First, it is much simple to deal with seven ruling families. Second, any change will bring the ideologies of Arab nationalism and Islamic militancy prevalent among large sections of the population.

· Despite the wide variety of news-gatherings and the high number of journalists, they were all essentially dependent upon the coalition military for their principal source of information about the progress of the war. It was monopoly in the guise of pluralism. The appearance of pluralistic media reporting camouflaged the ‘omnipotence’ of the official coalition propaganda.

Most of the censorship of sensitive footage took place right at the start of the image gathering process, although post-censorship would then also take place.

Mostly, it appear, censorship of news was confined largely to matters of operational security. Censorship of view was comparatively rare, being confined largely to religious matters. Censorship of opinion was difficult to implement anyway; there was nothing to stop a critical editor back home writing a hostile piece, although, again, it has to be remembered that the information upon which such views could be formed was being tightly controlled at source. Besides, censoring opinions would really have been an admission of a bad cause.

As Susan Sachs Newsday reporter said , pool reporter could ‘only get an ant’s view of the war’. The degree to which coalition arrangements and reporting restrictions recognised and exploited this played a significant part in the outside world’s perception of the war.

· David Beresford in Guardian wondered ‘whether a Machiavellian strategy was involved or whether it was merely a exercise in stupidity?

It must be said that propaganda was being employed extensively by the enemy. This was also needed in view of the sensitivities concerning what was seen by some in the Muslim world as an American-inspired civil war fought between various factions of the Arab brotherhood. It was propaganda’s role to maintain the perception of a just war.

Concerning the real goal of the allied, it must be notice that the coalition ‘white’ propaganda stated all long that the intention was simply to remove Iraq from Kuwait. The coalition’ black propaganda was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

The war belonged primary to the air force. This had a important consequence for the media coverage of the war. Air power is a notoriously difficult weapon to evaluate for the media, in spite of the communication technology (i.e. cameras in the nose of smarts weapons). Moreover the presence of journalists in Baghdad added a third dimension to the bombing campaign because the damage assessors could see the aftermath of their raids

Nonetheless the casualties which viewers saw in the Gulf war were mainly Iraqi citizens.

Television amplifies the distance. As for the Amiriya or Mutlah Gap even if the censors did not get to them first, then the broadcasters themselves don’t want to put it on the screen.

Some assumes that citizens knew what was going on and are backing the Government all the same. So if the war is being argued properly with the viewers, you can have a just war and you can fight it.

War is a nasty, brutal business and television viewers know it. That does not mean that they want to see it on their television screen.

How was create the overwhelming western opinion to fight against Saddam Hussein? What was the role of the media?

In the anti-Iraqi Arab coalition partners, one would expect the media to toe the government line. In the democracy, however, the degree to which the media were generally supportive of their governments, their involvement and their cause, is sticking. Discording voices were rare, even though they were seldom found represented proportionally to their size in the media.

So long as the truth comes out in the end, the democratic publics of Britain and the United States do indeed seem prepared to suspend their right to know, provided they believe the war to be just and the anticipated gains worth the price of the deaths of a certain number of professional soldiers. This is a ‘harmful precedent’ because it could be used to justify censorship.

Moreover, how appear this willingness to not be inform even for a war which is believed to be just? Does it could be the gain of a previous and machiavelic propaganda? Could it be the first goal on a propaganda ploy of view for the next war which ‘have to be’ fight?

As Hess explained " Freedom of the press, freedom of information, is an abstraction. Another basic right - the freedom to defend yourself from death - is not an abstraction... For most people, the priorities aren’t very mysterious: First you win the war, then you have a free press." So the public opinion is that they accepted to forgot their free press during time of war.

Les conclusions sont bien sûr discutables.

Quelques images édifiantes, révélatrices de la désinformation qui a été orchestrée.