HOTEL WARRIORS: Covering the Gulf War ...

HOTEL WARRIORS: Covering the Gulf War by John J. Fialka (The Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press: $9.75, illustrated). A reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Fialka drew on his own experiences as well as interviews with other journalists for this entertaining and disturbing account of how the press covered the Gulf War. Although the military and governmental efforts to restrict the flow of news set a dangerous precedent, the often unprepared television, radio and print reporters compounded the problems with their endless bickering and back-stabbing. As a result, the American people received incomplete and often inaccurate information. The author cites the case of a radio reporter who broadcast the sounds of a Scud missile attack from the basement of a hotel in Dhahran: The sinister booms were actually produced by hotel employees slamming the door of the walk-in cooler. The paranoia many Army officers felt toward the media “helped bury one of the most positive Army stories since World War II”; the Marines shrewdly exploited the presence of the media--and gained a disproportionate amount of coverage. Noting that “what worked and what didn’t work in the Gulf War battlefields will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and drive major federal budget decisions for years to come,” Fialka concludes ominously, “The matter of how the press covers the next war involving American forces is an issue that is too important to be left to the press or the military to be decided, but, in a vacuum, they will decide it.”