its U.N. allies in an effort to liberate Kuwait, they dis-
covered that the U.S. military was not allowing the
same level of independent reporting they had when
they covered the Vietnam War. Journalists now were
required to follow strict media pool guidelines limit-
ing what information they would be permitted to re-
port. Military public affairs officers would shepherd
journalists on guided tours of coalition troops, de-
ciding where the reporters could go and whom they
could interview. However, the Cable News Network
(CNN) refused to be confined by the military’s re-
strictive media pool guidelines. Instead, the network
sent reporters to Baghdad to do what had never
been done before—cover the war live from the en-
emy’s capital city.
When the first allied bombing raid on Baghdad
began on January 17, 1991, CNN was the only news
outlet able to broadcast live telephone voice reports
of the attacks. Hiding under beds and desks in a
Baghdad hotel, CNN reporters Peter Arnett, Ber-
nard Shaw, and John Holliman were the first to tell
the world that war had begun, thus scooping the
U.S. military’s official announcement by twenty-
seven minutes. During the initial hours of the inva-
sion, with no video available for another twenty-four
hours, even the competing U.S. networks were
broadcasting CNN reports, complete with the CNN
logo on the screen. U.S. general Colin Powell, chair
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged in his first
two media briefings that the Pentagon, too, was
watching CNN.
The Iraqi military temporarily stopped CNN’s
nonstop war coverage by banning all live broadcast-
ing from the country, forcing CNN’s Baghdad team
off the air after sixteen intermittent hours. Iraq later
expelled all the foreign media except for CNN’s vet-
eran war correspondent Peter Arnett and his team,
producer Robert Wiener and engineer Nic Rob-
ertson.
CNN was beyond the reach of the U.S. military
censors, but now the network had to abide by Iraqi
media-censorship rules. The Iraqi government se-
lected CNN’s reporting locations and monitored
Arnett’s interviews. As a result, many of Arnett’s sto-
ries focused on bombing damage to civilian areas
and the suffering of the Iraqi people. Two weeks af-
ter the war began, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein
granted CNN’s Arnett his first television interview,
which was beamed to millions of viewers in 106 coun-
tries.
CNN’s war coverage would contradict informa-
tion provided by military officials during their daily
televised media briefings. In one story, Arnett re-
ported that military cruise missiles had destroyed a
baby powdered milk factory in Baghdad and not a
chemical weapons plant as the military had stated.
Despite pressure from the U.S. government to
leave Iraq, CNN stayed in Baghdad throughout the
Gulf War and dominated the war coverage by provid-
ing a continuous flow of information from Baghdad,
Riyadh, Amman, Tel Aviv, and U.S. military and
White House news conferences.
Reaction to CNN’s War Coverage Many Americans,
including members of Congress and even fellow
journalists, severely criticized CNN for airing re-
ports about the war that had been provided or cen-
sored by the Iraqi government. Arnett was called a
traitor and an Iraqi sympathizer, and his reporting
was labeled as a propaganda tool by Hussein. CNN’s
competitors called its round-the-clock war coverage
biased, amateurish, inaccurate, and simplistic. How-
ever, at the same time, hundreds of U.S. reporters
sent to Saudi Arabia felt censored because they did
not have easy access to the troops on the ground and
were not allowed to go with the fighter jets that
bombed Baghdad. The Pentagon explained that the
media pool guidelines were necessary to protect
U.S. troops, military operations, and even the jour-
nalists because U.S. enemies were watching CNN.
Because the U.S. military knew that Iraqi govern-
ment leaders were watching CNN’s live war coverage
as a source of intelligence, it used CNN and other
television news organizations as part of its strategy to
confuse the enemy. The military allowed worldwide
television coverage of its warships practicing a land-
ing off the coast of Saudi Arabia, giving the impres-
sion that the military planned to attack by sea, but
never let on that the practice landing was staged to
deceive Iraq. When allied forces attacked on Febru-
ary 24, 1991, the attack came by land instead. One
hundred hours after the ground war began, Presi-
dent George H. W. Bush ordered a cease-fire, and it
was CNN that broke the news of Hussein’s offer to
withdraw from Kuwait.
Impact CNN’s continuous presence in Baghdad,
along with the technology that allowed its reporters
to get its war coverage to viewers around the world,
catapulted the network past the three major U.S.
networks for the first time in its history. CNN’s last-The Nineties in America CNN coverage of the Gulf War 203