Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War

While the United States government made noisy preparations to go to war against Saddam Hussein, it was also purposefully planning another war. But this enemy, unlike Hussein, was strangely passive in the face of these threatening maneuvers. John R. MacArthur scrutinizes the government’s unprecedented assault on the constitutional freedoms of the American media during Operation Desert Storm. With a reporter’s critical eye and a historian’s sensibility, he traces decades of press-government relations—during Vietnam, Grenada, and Panama—which helped set the stage for restrictions on Gulf War reporting and for a public-relations triumph by the government.