TV Guide Sidebar

Some things are hard to recall because they are such an insult to our normal view of ourselves that we can't connect them to our pretty self-portraits. We couldn't be sane, moral, non-stupid human beings if we knew that our President had conned us into a war with Iraq by using a PR firm's scripted, rehearsed, fake news films.

We could tell ourselves that we had learned that Old Bush had conned us into slaughtering Iraq after the fact, which left us helpless to stop it.

But nobody in America would be dumb enough to allow Old Bush's son (Beavis Bush) to get away with a war of unmitigated aggression---against the same people...would we?

... unless they'd forgotten about that article in TV GUIDE, the most widely circulated publication in America.

The February 22-February 28, 1992 issue of TV GUIDE, which came out almost exactly a year after we finished slaughtering Iraqis in what we grotesquely referred to as the Gulf War, featured a long article by David Lieberman titled "Fake News."

The article describes how private companies hire Public Relations firms to produce video tapes that look like "real" news reports. These self-serving Fake News clips are then made available to television news shows that carry them without mentioning the fact that they are phony! The result is that an already large and rapidly increasing percentage of what we see on the nightly news is PHONY. It's fiction, make up, scripted, rehearsed.

Lieberman calls it "fake news." A photocopy of the first page of the article appears below.

The part of the article that focuses specifically on Bush's Fake News video was the long sidebar by Morgan Strong. The complete text of the sidebar that accompanied the TV Guide article appears below.

Portions of the

GULF WAR

were brought to you by…

the folks at

Hill and Knowlton

By Morgan Strong

By now, it is well known that some portions of the Persian Gulf war effort were stage-managed in an effort to rally public opinion for military action against Iraq. The two leading television newsmagazines, ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s 60 Minutes, devoted segments last month to the fact that an emotional appeal in 1990 before a Congressional caucus hearing, supposedly by an anonymous Kuwaiti refugee girl called Nayirah, was, in fact, delivered by the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S. Both stories followed a New York Times op-ed piece that exposed Nayirah's true identity, by John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine.

Further, it was revealed that the public-relations firm of Hill and Knowlton, headed at the time by Craig Fuller, former chief of staff to George Bush when he was Vice President, helped to package and rehearse the young woman's appearance on behalf of their client, Citizens for a Free Kuwait, an exile organization primarily funded by the Emir of Kuwait. Nayirah's testimony was that Iraqi soldiers had stormed hospitals and torn newborn babies from their incubators, leaving them to die. Her story, which received wide network coverage—and was invoked on numerous occasions by President Bush—had in fact been rehearsed by video cameras by Hill and Knowlton. But according to Kuwaiti doctors interviewed by 20/20 and 60 Minutes, no such incident had occurred.

If this had been the only occurrence of packaged war reporting broadcast in the heat of war hysteria, it might be excusable. But what I found during my long stint in Saudi Arabia (I was a consultant for both PBS's Frontline and England's Thames Television) was a far more systematic manipulation of news by the PR firm than is generally known:

< Following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, refugees with stories about conditions in their country were selected and the agenda of Hill and Knowlton’s client—were made available to news organizations, thus limiting journalists' ability to independently assess claims of brutality. Indeed the PR firm’s operatives were given free rein to travel unescorted throughout Saudi Arabia, while journalists were severely restricted.

< Hill and Knowlton also was the source for a large number of the amateur videos shot inside Kuwait and smuggled out. The videos were collected, screened and edited at the PR firm's TV studios in the Saudi capital, Riyedh, and in the coastal city of Dharan. The packaged videotapes were then distributed free of charge to the networks, ostensibly by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. In the U.S., Hill and Knowiton also distributed the tapes to affiliated and independent stations.

< A second woman who was identified as simply another Kuwaiti refugee, and who made an appearance before a widely televised session of the UN Security Council on Nov. 27, 1990, turned out to be a close relative of a senior Kuwaiti official. The woman, Fatima Fahed, came before the world body as it was debating the use of force to oust the Iraqis from Kuwait. She gave harrowing details of Iraqi atrocities inside her country.

What was not reported is that Fahed was, in fact, the wife of Sulaiman AIMutawa, Kuwait's minister of planning, and herself a well-known TV personality in Kuwait. Surprised that a high-profile Kuwaiti could be labeled, and accepted, as just another "refugee," I asked one of the leaders of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, Fawzi Al-Sultan, why Fahed had been chosen to speak to the UN. "Because of her professional experience," he said, "she is more believable."

But, like the story related by Nayirah, Fahed's testimony was not necessarily true. In testifying to the UN, she implied that her information was firsthand. "Such stories...I personally have experienced," she said. But when I had interviewed her in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, before her UN appearance, she told me that she had no firsthand knowledge of the events she was describing. Some weeks later, in advance of her UN testimony, she and other witnesses were coached—including rehearsals, wardrobe and prepared scripts—extensively by employees of Hill and Knowlton.

< A tape from inside Kuwait, supplied to journalists by the PR firm before the U.S.-led invasion, purported to show peaceful Kuwaiti demonstrators being fired upon by the occupying Iraqi troops.

But, on the ground in Saudi Arabia, I managed to interview a Kuwaiti refugee present at the demonstration, whose story was quite different. The man, a Kuwaiti policeman, said that no demonstrators were injured, and that gunshots captured on tape were, in fact, those of Iraqi troops firing on nearby resistance fighters, who had fired first at the Iraqis. When I asked him to appear on camera and tell the true story, he refused. "1 do not want to harm the resistance," he said.

None of this is to suggest that the Iraqis did not perpetrate atrocities while occupying Kuwait, nor does it underestimate the difficulties facing the media in obtaining original material under censorship conditions. However, these examples are but a few of the incidents of outright misinformation that found their way onto the network news. It is an inescapable fact that much of what Americans saw on their news broadcasts, especially leading up to the Allied offensive against Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, was in large measure the contrivance of a public-relations firm.

Morgan Strong is a freelance reporter specializing in the Middle East