As I sat in an airplane reading Philip Knightley’s analysis of the relationship between government and the media during the Gulf War, widely acknowledged as a major turning point in American war correspondence, the woman sitting next to me suddenly piped up and revealed that she was a veteran of the Gulf War (and that she felt reading was a boring way for me to study it)—from a low income family, she was unfortunate enough to have witnessed the war as more than a video game the way many people remember the green screens with periodic flashes framing the over-enunciating talking heads in the foreground. This woman, like Knightley, knew an Iraq filled with body parts strewn about on anarchic streets, American soldiers covered in their own blood, and angry civilians forever traumatized by the fate of their family members.

For Knightley, war correspondents faced an unprecedented degree of censorship in the Gulf War due to a direct and aggressive campaign by a U.S. military that had learned its lessons about the importance of public opinion in Vietnam. From the beginning, all actors involved were well aware that American public opinion reigned supreme in governing not only the course of the war, but the very decision to go to war. Indeed, one of the key humanitarian triggers, a myth that Iraqi soldiers were ripping Kuwaiti babies from their incubators and leaving them to die, was fabricated entirely by an American public relations form employed by the Kuwaiti government (Knightley, 488). Once the war was underway, the American military explicitly censored the information available to its public by allowing only correspondents known to be “friendly” to the war access to the press pool, forcing them to wear military uniforms, labeling journalists who dared to document real carnage “unpatriotic,” and even threatening physical violence against these “intruders” on occasion (491). In addition to criticizing the military’s undemocratic actions vis-à-vis the press, Knightley sheds light on the deceitful “sanitizing” of war through technological language, which represented “an attempt to change public perception of the nature of war itself, to convince everyone that new technology has removed a lot of war’s horrors” (494). For a public whose only exposure to these “horrors” was a dark screen featuring distant, video game-like explosions in the background, it is no wonder the pseudo-scientific discourse of precise, or “smart,” weaponry was readily accepted. Particularly abominable in Knightley’s view was the military's bold declaration that the two hundred Tomahawk missiles it had fired represented a 98% launch success rate, all the while defining “launch success rate” as the proportion of missiles launched successfully—what the missile did after it was launched was irrelevant (496). This undercurrent of active elite manipulation against a relatively inactive and innocent public runs throughout his analysis.

Perhaps most striking about Knightley’s analysis of the media’s failings during the Gulf War is his fruitless search for a cause or a culprit. Why was this war different from other before and since? Was it truly different from them at all? If it was different, who was at fault? He is blatantly critical of the particular administration in charge during the war for its cynicism and its open hostility to a fundamental pillar of American democracy: a free press. However, this thesis makes one question the health of a democracy in which the press can be squelched at the whim of a particularly hawkish administration any time one is voted into power. Since the beginning of American democracy, individual leaders have been tempted repeatedly to subvert the system, particularly in times of war. By limiting his discussion simply to the direct relationship between the media and the military (with the public as a third wheel willing to support whichever side emerges victorious), Knightley rarely questions the failure of the checks and balances system to protect that fundamental freedom of speech to which Americans usually adhere so tightly. Subtle grabs at dictatorial power are, unfortunately, an undeniable feature of democratic government.

Knightley occasionally strays from blaming the monstrous government and shifts his attention to the media themselves, who “unwittingly acted as unpaid publicists to help weapons manufacturers get government contracts” (497), failed to enlighten the masses on Britain’s disastrous colonial role in Iraqi history (500), and allowed themselves to be divided and conquered by engaging in a myopic competition for military access that forced them to cater to military interests over their own journalistic integrity (490). However, despite these detours, he remains loyal to his original culprits: the U.S. government and military. According to the Knightley narrative, the government lied while the media were lied to, the military threatened while the media were threatened, the government and military together blacklisted while the media were blacklisted. Markedly absent from this narrative is the American public itself, ironically despite its role as the centerpiece of the post-Vietnam war theater. Although he casually notes that nearly eighty percent of American and British citizens believed censorship was the right policy in wartime and sixty percent believed censorship should actually increase (492), he never pursues this line of thought to the extent it deserves. The American public did not play a peripheral role in determining the relationship between the media and the military in the case of the Gulf War; it operated as a third, equally dynamic actor as capable of altering them as they were capable of altering it.

Neither the media nor the government exists without a public and vice versa. In this way, they are mutually constitutive to an extent that makes any analysis neglecting one of the three dimensions (the government, the media, and the public) in the study of war correspondence at least somewhat dubious. As Anderson Cooper once insinuated in a moment of profound cynicism while giving a lecture at Brown, the mainstream media are financially constrained by their publics who dictate what material they must show (and not show) in order to remain alive in the competitive news market. As it turns out, Knightley’s frustrations with the war coverage during the Gulf War demonstrate the importance of a democratically minded society in maintaining an atmosphere truly conducive to transparency during times of war when all other forces seem to conspire against it. Perhaps a good litmus test for this theory will be the You Tube Effect. It is entirely plausible that once the public has unlimited visual access to the gruesome horrors of war (although media presence is still constrained by military policy, the likelihood that there will be leaks to the press increases dramatically with this virtual democratization), its appetite for these horrors will change in the process. However, it seems to me that the military was permitted to treat the media in such an aggressive, undemocratic manner at least in part because the American public was thoroughly satisfied with its black and green video game. Contrary to what Knightley seems to argue, the truly frightening aspect of Gulf War correspondence is not that the military-entertainment complex managed to convince the public that war was actually “sanitized”—I doubt that this effect was ever achieved in a literal sense—but that the public was content with its own sanitized illusion.

Similar problems emerge from the second half of the Knightley reading, which concerns the relationship between the media and NATO in the 1999 intervention in Serbia. He mentions the fickle role of the public this time when he claims that “[t]he revolution in communications technology…should have provided the public with an unprecedented overview of the war…Instead, the public drowned in wave after wave of images that added up to nothing” (504). However, just as before Knightley’s main complaints are against the various governments involved and the media itself, which “must shoulder a large share of the blame for the poor way the war was covered” (505), while the role of democratic media consumption is again conspicuously absent from his analysis. In this case, he follows the various cover-ups, scandals, and skillful lies regularly employed by NATO representatives to block the public from discovering NATO’s major mistakes and atrocities while some tougher correspondents like John Simpson of the BBC fought tooth and nail for their right to report the whole truth. While the military may have attempted to smear Simpson for being unpatriotic because he reported “from the other side” (the Serbian side of the battle), Knightley acknowledges that he was “well able to defend himself” and quotes Simpson himself saying “we were free to say what we wanted to say” (513). In other words, despite an aggressive backlash against honest reporting in Serbia, at least a few established war correspondents were able to overcome the barriers before them.

So what happened to this information once it passed the military censors? Knightley notes that “[i]n the flush of victory few wanted to know the cost in either human or financial terms” (520). It is true that many of these stories never hit headlines despite their obvious importance in educating the public about realities on the ground in Serbia. For example, Audrey Gillian, a British reporter who openly doubted the validity of NATO claim that the Serbs had committed massacres and genocide, had her story denied by the Guardian and was instead forced to publish in a less well-respected newspaper. Indeed, the economic element of war reporting (a factor Knightley glosses over) is central to understanding the changing relationship between the military and the media in wartime. However, this factor cannot possibly be understood without taking the public, with its social trends and personal ties to a given conflict, into serious consideration. Although Knightley rarely considers this dimension of the media war, he does concede that “it is likely that [citizens] do not want truthful, objective and balanced reporting that good war correspondents once did their best to provide” (525). Although I am suspicious of the nostalgia underlying this point, it is a least plausible that, in the battle between the media and the military for control over the war theater, the audience may have changed right along with the traditional actors. The salient question is whether the You Tube Effect has or will spur yet another transformation in the target audience or whether it will simply reflect the new tastes this audience acquired during the “sanitized” wars of the 1990s. We’ll have to wait and see.